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BEING SPEECHES ON DRAMATIC 
AND KINDRED OCCASIONS 



BY 

WILLIAM WINTER 




public ationjef of €1^ 2DunIa^ ^ocietp, l^eto Jtttk^ 
l^ctoforfe, 1898. 





This is one of an edition of two hundred and sixty 
7Q copies printed from type foi 
in the month of November, 1898 



five copies printed from type for the^Dunlap Society 




. QC,{^^^^^^' 




X 




E. BIERSTADT, ARTOTYPE. 



ley 



A WREATH OF LAUREL 



BEING 
SPEECHES ON DRAMATIC 
AND KINDRED OCCASIONS 

BY 

WILLIAM WINTER 




NEW YORK 
THE DUNLAP SOCIETY 

1898 



TS334-1 
18176 




Copyright 
By William Winter 



£r:d cf^p-:, ({ mil wm 



I *v^' r^y i^4 



%. 



i^ S^^l 



TO 



EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 

WHOSE FINE GENIUS AND EXQUISITE ART 

HAVE ILLUMINED AND ADORNED 

MORE THAN FORTY YEARS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 

WITH HONOR FOR HIS ACHIEVEMENT 

WITH GRATITUDE FOR HIS EXAMPLE 

AND WITH AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE 

OF HIS LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP 

WILLIAM WINTER 

July z5, i8g8 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. Henry Irving and the Drama. 

Speech and Poem at a Pen and Pencil 
Club Festival in Honor of Henry 
Irving, at the Waterloo Hotel, 
Edinburgh, October 31, 1894 ... i 

II. Ian Maclaren: Poetry and Pathos in 
Scottish Literature. 
Speech and Poem at a Festival in 
Honor of Ian Maclaren (Dr. John 
Watson) given by the Lotos Club, 
New York, December 6, 1896 ... 15 

III. The Stage and its Apostles. 

Speech and Poem delivered before 
the Lotos Club, New York, at a 
Festival given by the Club, in Honor 
of the Speaker, April 24, 1897 . . 27 

IV. The Intellectual Standard in Acting 

AND Writing. 
Speech delivered before the Actors' 
Fund Society, at the Garrick Thea- 
tre, New York, June 8, 1897 ... 41 



viii Contottjs?* 



PAGE 



V. The Ancient Glories of the Roman 
Catholic Church. 
Speech and Poem at a Festival in 
Honor of Judge Joseph F. Daly, 
given by the Catholic Club, New 
York, November 6, 1897 51 

VI. Joseph Jefferson: The Poet and the 
Actor. 
Speech and Poem at a Festival in 
Honor of Joseph Jefferson, given 
BY the Colonial Club, New York, 
March 31, 1898 59 



II 

I. Youth and Opportunity. 

Speech delivered at the Theatre 
in Stapleton, Staten Island, June 
i9> 1891 73 

II. The Ideal in Education. 

Speech delivered at the Theatre 
IN Stapleton, Staten Island, June 
17, 1892 87 



^Tontent^* 



III. The Truth in Eulogy. 

Speech delivered on Curtis Memo- 
rial Day, at the Staten Island 
Academy, February 25, 1895 ... 99 

IV. The Ideal in Life. 

Speech delivered at the Theatre 
in Stapleton, Staten Island, June 
18, 1895 107 

V. In Memory of George William Curtis. 
Speech delivered at the Seminary 
Building, New Brighton, Staten Is- 
land, February 24, 1896 117 

VI. The Staten Island Academy. 

A Word of Welcome. — The Intel- 
lectual Principle. — A Word of 
Farewell. — Speeches delivered at 
THE Staten Island Academy, June 15 
AND June 16, 1896 129 

Record of Names 143 



PREFACE. 

Associates of mine in the Dunlap Society, being 
desirous of another book from my pen, have approved 
this collection of my comparatively recent speeches, 
and I now offer it with the hope that members of the 
Society in general, and other readers to whom it may 
come, will accept it, if not with entire approbation, at 
least with kindly tolerance. 

Some of these speeches relate to dramatic subjects, 
and others, not specifically dramatic, which I have 
ventured to include, relate to kindred subjects, because 
they descant on the study of human experience and 
the conduct of human life. The Academic Speeches, 
constituting Part Second of the volume, are included 
for the reason that, as souvenirs of a writer long and 
intimately associated with the stage, they may com- 
mend themselves to the favor of theatrical readers; 
and also for the reason that they relate to a Library, 
founded by me, which is opulent with dramatic and 
musical books, and other artistic treasures, and which, 
by particular ordainment, is accessible to members of 
the dramatic profession. 

Reference may appropriately be made, in this place, 
to earlier volumes of my speeches, to which this is a 
companion. My oration on "The Press and the 
Stage," delivered before the Goethe Society, at the 



xii ^tttatt* 

Brunswick Hotel, New York, January 28, 1889, was 
originally published in " Harper's Weekly," March 23, 
1889, and afterward was put into a book: only 250 
copies of it were made, and that book is out of print. 
My oration on " The Actor, and his Duty to his 
Time," was delivered before the Actors' Fund Society, 
at Palmer's Theatre, New York, June 4, 1889, and it 
was published in " Harper's Weekly " the next day. 
Messrs. Harper & Brothers, at all times considerate 
of authors, generously waived their claim of copyright, 
and sanctioned a reprint of both those works. The 
later and a few companions constitute Number Thirteen 
of the first series of the publications of the Dunlap 
Society, having been issued, under the title of " The 
Actor, and Other Speeches," in 1891. On February 
24, 1893, at the Castleton, St. George, Staten Island, 
I delivered an oration commemorative of George 
William Curtis, and that was published, a little later, 
by Messrs. Macmillan & Co. The present, accord- 
ingly, is the fourth volume of my speeches. 

I have never pretended to be an orator, I never 
liked to meet or to see crowds of people, and I never 
was conscious of a desire to convert anybody to my 
way of thinking, on any subject whatever. Orators 
aim to convince and to sway; my aim has been to 
extol genius, to celebrate nobility, to declare the wor- 
ship of beauty, and, if possible, to diffuse a soothing 
and elevating charm of poetic grace. In my youth, 
in 1856, impelled by the political enthusiasm of that 
storm-swept time, I became a speaker for Fremont, in 
the presidential campaign against Buchanan, and sub- 



ptttatt* xiii 

sequently I delivered lectures at New England ly- 
ceums, and so the art of public speaking became more 
or less a custom. 

The favor accorded to these speeches when they 
were spoken encourages me to think that they may be 
liked when they are read, and it is my hope that they 
will serve a good purpose to the historian, in the distant 
future, by helping to show that certain fine spirits of 
our age were not unappreciated in their own generation. 



W. W. 



Fort Hill, New Brighton, 
Staten Island, N. Y., 
September 24, 1898. 



I 
DRAMATIC SPEECHES 



HENRY IRVING 




^:a^/ ^^f 



A WREATH OF LAUREL 



l$tntii 3>*ing ana tl^e ?E>rama. 

speech and poem at a festival in honor of 

henry irving, given by the pen and 

pencil club, at the waterloo hotel, 

edinburgh, october 31, 1894.^ 

Mr. President and Gentlemen of 

THE Pen and Pencil Club : 

IT is a pleasure and a privilege to meet this dis- 
tinguished assemblage, the choice and master 
spirits of art and of thought in this beautiful and re- 
nowned city of Edinburgh, — " dear for her reputation 
through the world " : yet the pleasure is not un- 
tempered with solicitude. I am deeply conscious of 
the honor conferred on me, — a stranger and a wan- 
derer from a distant land, — by your wish that I should 
respond to the toast of the Drama, with which my 

lA festival in honor of Henry Irving was given at midnight of October 31, 
1894, at the Waterloo Hotel, Edinburgh, by the Pen and Pencil Club, of that 
city. About one hundred and fifty persons were present, representative of the 
art, literature, and society of Edinburgh. The place was the great hall of the 
Waterloo, which thirty years ago was a theatre. The chair was taken by G. W. 
W. Barclay, Esq., of Aberdeen, — the vice-chairmen being Messrs. J. C. Dibdin 
(grandson of Charles Dibdin, author of the sea songs) and A. W. Yokes. 



2 % Wtteitl^ of SaureL 

name has been so graciously coupled, and I thank 
you, most gratefully, for the signal kindness with which 
the mention of that name has been received. The 
Drama is an institution with which I have been associ- 
ated during most of my life, and one which I have, in 
an humble way, faithfully labored to serve : yet I can- 
not fail to reflect that every thought which is likely to 
occur to my mind, in speaking to such an audience as 
this, — an audience of artists and thinkers, — upon any 
subject connected with art, probably has occurred to 
each one of my listeners, over and over again. Un- 
der circumstances less important I might venture to 
take refuge among the anecdotes. There is "snug 
lying in the abbey " of old Joe Miller. Under the 
circumstances that exist I cannot but remember how 
dangerous it is to rehearse old stories in the presence 
of club men and experienced men of the world. The 
most felicitous of comic yams, marred by publicity, 
becomes at last monotonous,— like Charles Lamb's 
" Poor Relation," — and " the guests think they have 
seen him before." 

This moment, for me, accordingly, is one of serious 
trial, and I must be permitted to add that my perplex- 
ity is heightened by a deep and stirring sense of my 

The chairman, referring to the occasion as the twentieth anniversary of Irving's 
performance of Hamlet, at the London Lyceum, — then managed by H. L. 
Bateman, — paid an earnest tribute to the genius of the actor, and to his wise 
and fine conduct of his dramatic career. Irving, in the course of an eloquent 
reply, advocated the establishment of a municipal theatre. Musical exercises 
followed, and speeches were made by Messrs. G. A. Peacock, Bram Stoker, 
and J. C. Dibdin. In reply to the toast of the Drama, I delivered the following 
speech and poem. Much of the speech was humorous, "but that part of it was 
not reported and has been lost. 



ipenrp 3(»^bmg* 



extraordinary environment. Amid the scenes and 
associations that now surround me, it is, I think, ex- 
ceedingly difficult to fix the mind upon the facts of 
the present, or to put into intelligible form the impres- 
sions that are prompted by the passing hour. You, to 
whom these scenes are familiar, are able to dwell 
among them with comparative composure, — for they 
are a part of your every-day experience. The stranger, 
when he looks upon Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood 
Palace, the hallowed Grey friars and the storied Cathe- 
dral, the pathetic desolation of Craigmillar and the 
royal glory of Dunfermline, is agitated, astonished, 
bewildered, and overwhelmed. There, almost within 
the sound of my voice, is the grave of David Hume, 
— that strong and splendid historian, that wise phi- 
losopher, that benign, pure spirit, whom to remember 
is to bless! In yonder valley, hard by the dust of 
Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart, stands the stone 
that your national poet, Robert Burns, placed to com- 
memorate the genius of the lamented Ferguson, At 
the foot of your Castle Rock rest the ashes of the won- 
derful De Quincey. Along your High Street, tran- 
quil and fearless, going proudly to his death, still 
moves, in the gaze of fancy, the imperial figure of the 
great Montrose; and through the West Port and 
down the hill, while the drums crash and the trumpets 
blare, the intrepid Marquis of Dundee rides forth, un- 
knowing, to meet his doom. There is no limit to the 
wonderful and inspiring associations of this regal capi- 
tal. I cannot look upon them unmoved. I should 
be grieved indeed if I could walk the streets of your 



4 % Wttatfy of %mtd. 

august and lovely city without a thrill of more than 
common joy and gratitude to find myself treading in 
the footprints of Walter Scott. Familiar things, I 
say, these are to you, whose lot has been cast among 
them : but for the stranger it is no common experience 
to look upon the home of that illustrious genius whose 
influence upon this world, to exalt the human race 
and to bless, it, goes hand in hand with that of Shake- 
speare, and is scarcely second to that of the incompar- 
able master, in the magic and the grace of romantic 
art. 

In discussing the Drama there is always the danger 
— and I do not think it is always avoided — of run- 
ning into platitude. Speakers on the Drama are but 
too apt to tell us of its decline from certain "palmy 
days," — which no one of them can remember, — and 
of the great necessity which exists for "the elevation of 
the stage." Nothing could be more false, nothing 
more wearisome. The Drama requires neither res- 
toration nor authority ; for it is one of the elemental 
necessities of social life. But, while it stands in no 
need of regeneration, it requires, and it ought at all 
times to receive, wise and just treatment. In Great 
Britain it still endures the odium of conventional prej- 
udice. Dr. Johnson, I believe, — or was it some other 
sage ? — observed that a man may brew and still be a 
gentleman, while no man can be a gentleman and 
bake. The brewer, the tradesman, can go to Court. 
The actor is, practically, proscribed — and he is pro- 
scribed because of his profession. In America no 
such prejudice prevails. There is, of course, the re- 



^mtp fttJing. 



ligious antipathy; but that is dying away. In both 
America and Great Britain, however, the stage suffers 
under pernicious influences. In both countries there 
are vacuous persons who declare that all they want in 
the theatre is something to laugh at. In both coun- 
tries there is a narrow criticism that examines ideals 
and emotions with a tape-measure and a microscope. 
And in both there is the speculative theatrical manager 
who will present anything, no matter how vile, so that 
he can draw a good house. We are all familiar with 
the specious doctrine that the way to prosper is to 
" give the people what they want." I would not be a 
fanatic in my enthusiasm for the Drama. I would 
not insist upon continual Shakespeare or everlasting 
classics. I would not sequester the stage from the 
people: but I would most strongly insist that the 
Theatre shall not be mobbled up with the Music Hall, 
and that intellectual purpose and authority shall con- 
trol it, and not the crude taste of an idle multitude ; — 
to the end that prosperity may no longer be possible 
to those enemies of art and of society who are willing 
to traffic in human weakness and folly. 

Something might be said in protest against those 
dramatists of the hour who think it well to celebrate 
the infatuation of a male fool for a female idiot, — for- 
ever ringing the changes upon the ethics of matrimo- 
nial incontinence, and upon the vicious triviality of 
that profligate living so well designated by Dr. John- 
son as " conduct which, in all ages, the good have con- 
demned as vicious, and the bad have despised as 
foolish." That is a sad abuse. Let us look upon 



6 % Wttatlis of %mxtt\. 

our Drama not with despondency, but with faith and 
hope. The children of the gods do not perish. In 
each successive period of dramatic history a great man 
has arisen, to bear the torch of genius and to hght 
the pathway of art. In Shakespeare's time it was Bur- 
bage. After him came Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, 
Kean, Macready, and Edwin Booth. To-day the 
leader is your honored guest, Henry Irving. I need 
not dwell upon his career. The underlying principles 
of it are known to all the world, — profound faith in 
the beauty, purity, and power of dramatic art, and 
inflexible devotion to a noble ideal of life. This great 
actor is happily with you, and I know that your lives 
are brighter for his presence, and that the only touch 
of sadness in this hour is a thought of the parting that 
soon must come. Let me conclude these remarks with 
a few verses of mine, — written to honor him on an 
earlier occasion, but, perhaps, not inappropriate here, — 
as at least indicative of what we all feel, not only for 
him, but for that great actress and beautiful woman 
Ellen Terry, whose genius and whose superlative charm 
have potently aided and cheered his progress, and 
have shed an imperishable splendor upon the artistic 
achievements of his bright career. 



^entp ^(ttmg* 



HENRY IRVING. 1 

But let fhe golden waves leap up 

While yet our hearts beat near him ! 
No bitter drop be in the cup 

With which our hope would cheer him ! 
Pour the red roses at his feet! 

Wave laurel boughs above him ! 
And if we part or if we meet 

Be glad and proud to love him ! 

His life has made this iron age 

More grand and fair in story; 
Illumed our Shakespeare's sacred page 

With new and deathless glory; 
Refreshed the love of noble fame 

In hearts all sadly faring, 
And lit anew the dying flame 

Of genius and of daring. 

Long may his radiant summer smile 

Where Albion's rose is dreaming, 
And over art's Hesperian isle 

His royal banner streaming; 
While every trumpet blast that rolls 

From Britain's lips to hail him 
Is echoed in our kindred souls, 

Whose truth can never fail him. 

On your white wings, ye angel years. 

Through roseate sunshine springing. 
Waft fortune from all happier spheres. 

With garlands and with singing; 
Make strong that tender heart and true — 

That thought of Heaven to guide him — 
And blessings pour like diamond dew, 

On her that walks beside him ! 

1 Copyright by the Macmillan Company, of New York. 



% Wttat^ of %mtd. 



And when is said the last farewell, 

So solemn and so certain, 
And fate shall strike the prompter's bell 

To drop the final curtain, 
Be his, whom every muse hath blest. 

That best of earthly closes — 
To sink to rest on England's breast 

And sleep beneath her roses. 



An earlier tribute of mine to Henry Irving may appropriately 
be preserved in this place, — a speech and poem, delivered at a 
festival in his honor, given by many citizens of New York, at 
Delmonico's, April 6, 1885. 

In this illustrious presence and in this memorable 
hour I do not presume to think that any words of 
mine are needed to complete the expression of your 
sense of intellectual obligation to Henry Irving, or 
your sorrow in bidding him farewell. Having, in other 
places, said and written much in celebration of this 
theme, I might well be content to remain silent now. 
Such, however, was not the will of the immediate man- 
agers of this occasion, who lately signified to me that 
a few words from my lips would be expected here to- 
night, by way of a God-speed to the parting guest. 

Those words I could not decline to speak ; and per- 
haps it is not altogether inappropriate that a voice 
which has accompanied and proclaimed every one of 
his great professional triumphs upon the American 



Jpenrp SfJ^tJing* 



stage should be heard here, for one moment, in this 
crowning commemoration of his renown. This hour 
belongs to friendship. The memories of a long period 
come thronging into my thoughts j and with them 
comes that mournful sense of separation which is 
present to you all. 

In every true votary of the dramatic art you will 
perceive a peculiar and delicate sensibility. This is 
largely resultant from the fact that an actor, in pre- 
senting his art upon the stage, presents also his phys- 
ical personality — addressing the public as an actual 
individual, and not through the protective medium of 
print, or paint, or marble, or other material substance. 
And just as there is acute sensibility in the artist, so 
there should be, and naturally and usually there is, a 
deep sympathy in the nature of the rightful and com- 
petent judge of art. 

When you have long and patiently studied an 
actor's intellectual constitution ; when you have tried 
to fathom the depth of his feelings ; when you have 
minutely traced and interpreted the beauty and the 
mystery of his acting; when, striving to live in his 
grand ideals of imaginative life, you have been made 
to live a more exalted and glorious life of your own, 
it is inevitable that you should become bound to him 
by ties of an affection as true, as deep, as strong, and 
as permanent as any that human nature can feel. For 
this reason you are clustered to-night around this great 
actor, to bid him Farewell ; and I shall be glad if these 
simple lines of mine can even hint the tenderness 
which is warm at your hearts : 

5 



% Wteat^ of Hautcl* 



VALE.' 

I. 

Now fades across the glimmering deep, now darkly drifts away 

The royal monarch of our hearts, the glory of our day : 

The pale stars shine, the night wind sighs, the sad sea makes its 

moan, 
And we, bereft, are standing here, in silence and alone. 

Gone every shape of power and dread his magic touch could paint: 
Gone haunted Aram's spectral face, and England's martyred saint: 
Gone Mathias, of the frenzied soul, and Louis' sceptred guile, 
The gentle head of poor Lesurques, and Hamlet's holy smile. 

No more in gray Messina's halls shall love and revel twine ; 
No more on Portia's midnight bowers the moon of summer 

shine ; 
No golden barge on Hampton's stream salute the perfum'd 

shore ; 
No ghost on Denmark's rampart cliff affright our pulses more. 

The morning star of art, he rose across the eastern sea. 
To wake the slumbering harp and set the frozen fountain free : 
Now, wrapt in glory's mist, he seeks his orient skies again. 
And tender thoughts in sorrowing hearts are all that must re- 
main. 

11. 

Slow fade, across a drearier sea, beneath a darker sky. 

The dreams that cheer, the lights that lure, the baffled hopes that 

die. 
Youth's trust. Love's bliss. Ambition's pride — the white wings 

all are flown, 
And Memory walks the lonely shore, indifferent and alone. 

1 Copyright by the Macmillan Company, of New York. 



i^enrp 9[tbing» 



II 



Yet sometimes o'er that shadowy deep, by wand'ring breezes 

blown, 
Float odors from Hesperian isles, with music's organ tone. 
And something stirs within the breast, a secret, nameless thrill, 
To say, though worn and sear and sad, our hearts are human 

still ;— 

If not the torrid diamond wave that made young life sublime, 
If not the tropic rose that bloomed in every track of time. 
If not exultant passion's glow when all the world was fair. 
At least one flash of heaven, one breath of art's immortal air ! 

Ah, God make bright, for many a year, on Beauty's heavenly 

shrine, 
This hallowed fire that Thou hast lit, this sacred soul of Thine, 
While Love's sweet light and Sorrow's tear — life's sunshine 

dimm'd with showers — 
Shall keep for aye his memory green in these true hearts of 

ours ! 



IAN MACLAREN 



91an iHaclaren. 

POETRY AND PATHOS IN SCOTTISH 
LITERATURE. 

SPEECH AND POEM AT A LOTOS CLUB DINNER 
. TO IAN MACLAREN (REV. JOHN WATSON, D. D.), 
NEW YORK, DECEMBER 6, 1896. 

Mr, President AND Gentlemen of THE Lotos Club: 

IT is a pleasure to know, from the assurance we have 
just received, that every man who rises upon the 
platform of the Lotos Club immediately becomes elo- 
quent, — for I do not recall an occasion when the need 
of eloquence was more urgent. In this distinguished 
presence I should have been pleased to remain silent ; 
to listen, not to speak. But since, in your kindness, 
you will have it otherwise, I must thank you as well as 
I can, and I do thank you, most sincerely, for the privi- 
lege of participating in your whole-hearted and lovely 
tribute to the great writer who is your guest to-night. 
All that I feel, as an humble and obscure votary of 
literature standing in the presence of one of its masters, 
could not be briefly spoken, but the httle that it seems 
essential I should say can be said in a few words. 
My oratorical ministrations, as many of my present 
hearers are aware, have usually, and almost exclusively, 
been invoked upon occasions of farewell, — until I have 

IS 



i6 % Wttat^ of %amd. 

come to feel like that serious Boston clergyman who 
declined to read the wedding service because he con- 
sidered himself "reserved for funerals." A certain 
delightful humorist now present, however, has recorded 
for you the reassuring opinion of the grave-digger of 
Drumtochty, that there is no real pleasure in a mar- 
riage, because you never know how it will end: 
whereas there is no risk whatever in a burial. Under 
these circumstances you know what to expect. It is 
no part of my intention to infringe upon the facetious 
treatment of this occasion. 

About eight years ago, when I visited for the first 
time [1888], the glorious city of Edinburgh, I had the 
singular good fortune to meet with a venerable gentle- 
man, — Capt. W. Sandylands, — then more than eighty, 
who, in his youth, had personally known Sir Walter 
Scott ; and he described, minutely and with natural en- 
thusiasm, the appearance of that great man, as he had 
often seen him, when walking in Prince's street, on 
his way to and from that Castle street house which 
has become a shrine of devout pilgrimage from every 
quarter of the world. What a privilege it was to have 
looked upon that astonishing genius — that splendid 
image of chivalry and heroism! To have heard his 
voice ! To have seen his greeting smile ! To have 
clasped the hand that wrote "Ivanhoe" and "The 
Antiquary," " Old Mortality " and " The Lady of the 
Lake " ! As I listened, I felt myself drawn nearer 
and ever nearer to the sacred presence of a great 
benefactor ; to the presence of that wonderful man, 
who, next to Shakespeare, has, during all my life, been 



%m flu^aclaren* 17 



to me the most bountiful giver of cheer and strength 
and hope and happy hours. To you, my hearers, for- 
tunate children of the Lotos flower, within the twenty- 
six years of your club life, has fallen the golden op- 
portunity of personal communion with some of the 
foremost men, whether of action or of thought, who 
have arisen to guide and illumine the age; — Froude, 
who so royally depicted the pageantry and pathos of 
the Past ; Grant, who so superbly led the warrior le- 
gions of the Present; Charles Kingsley, with his deep 
and touching voice of humanity; Wilkie Collins, with 
his magic wand of mystery and his weird note of ro- 
mance; Oliver Wendell Holmes, the modern Theoc- 
ritus, the most comforting of philosophers; Mark Twain, 
true and tender heart and first humorist of the age ; 
and Henry Irving, noble gentleman and prince of 
actors. Those bright names, and many more, will rise 
in your glad remembrance ; and I know you will agree 
that, in every case, when the generous mind pays its 
homage to the worth of a great man, the impulse is 
not that of adulation, but that of gratitude. Such is 
the feeling of this hour, when now you are assembled 
to honor the author of the " Bonnie Brier Bush," the 
most exquisite literary artist, in the vein of mingled 
humor and pathos, who has risen in Scotland, since the 
age when Sir Walter Scott, — out of the munificence 
of his fertile genius, — created Wamba the Jester, Cud- 
die Headrigg, Caleb Balderstone, Dugald Dalgetty, 
Dominie Sampson, and Jeannie Deans. 

There are two principles of art, or canons of criti- 
cism, call them what you will, to which my allegiance 
6 



i8 ^ Wttatf^ of %amd. 

is irrevocably plighted : that it is always best to show 
to mankind the things which are to be emulated, 
rather than the things which are to be shunned, and 
(since the moral element, whether as morality or im- 
morality, is present in all things, perpetually obvious, 
and always able to take care of itself), that no work 
of art should have an avowed moral. Those prin- 
ciples are conspicuously illustrated in the writings of 
Dr. Watson. Without didacticism they teach, and 
without effort they charm. Their strength is ele- 
mental; their stroke is no less swift than sure, — like 
the scimetar of Saladdin, which, with one sudden waft 
of the strong and skilful hand, could shear in twain the 
scarf of silk or the cushion of down. Dr. Watson has 
himself told you that " we cannot analyze a spiritual 
fact." We all know that the spirit of his art is noble, 
and that its influence is tender and sweet. We all 
know that it has, again and again, suddenly, and at 
the same instant, brought the smile to our lips and the 
tears into our eyes. I cannot designate its secret. I 
suppose it to be the same inaccessible charm of truth 
that hallows the simple words of the dying Lear : 

Pray you undo this button : Thank you, sir ; 

the same ineffable pathos that is in the death speech 
of Brutus : 

Night hangs upon mine eyes ; my bones would rest, 
That have but labour'd to attain this hour ; 

the same voice of patient grief that breathes in the 
touching farewell of Cassius : 



Slan ^atWm. 19 



Time is come round, 
And where I did begin there shall I end — 
My life is run his compass ; 

the same woful sense and utterance of human misery 
that thrills through the wonderful words of Timon : 

My long sickness 
Of health and living now begins to mend, 
And nothing brings me all things ; 

the same exquisite flow of feeling that is in the lilt of 
Burns, when he sings of the Jacobite cavalier : 

He turned him right and round about 

Upon the Irish shore ; 
And gave his bridle reins a shake 

With adieu for evermore, my dear, 

And adieu for evermore. 

I remember that magic touch in some of the poems 
of Richard Henry Stoddard, and in some of the stories 
— the matchless American stories — of Bret Harte. 
I recognize it in the sad talk of poor old Bows, the 
fiddler, when, in the night, upon the bridge at Chat- 
teris, he speaks to the infatuated Pendennis, about the 
heartless and brainless actress to whom they both are 
devoted, and drops the stump of his cigar into the 
dark water below. I feel it in that solemn moment 
when, as the tolling bell of the Charterhouse chapel 
calls him for the last time to prayer, the finest gentle- 
man in all fiction answers to his name and stands in 
the presence of the Master : and I say that there is 
but one step from the death-bed of Colonel Newcome 
to the death-bed of William Maclure. 



20 % Wtmf^ of Haurd* 

Through all that is finest and most precious in lit- 
erature, like the King's Yarn in the cables of the old 
British navy, runs that lovely note of poetry and 
pathos. So, from age to age, the never-dying torch 
of genius is passed from hand to hand. When Rob- 
ert Burns died, in 1796, it might have been thought 
that the authentic voice of poetry had been hushed 
forever; but, even then, a boy was playing on the 
banks of the Dee, whose song of passion and of grief 
would one day convulse the world ; and the name of 
him was Byron. In that year of fatality, 1832, when 
Crabbe and Scott and Goethe died, and when the ob- 
server could not but remember that Keats and Shelley 
and Byron were also gone, it might again have been 
thought that genius had taken its final flight to Hea- 
ven ; but, even then, among the pleasant plains of 
Lincolnshire, the young Tennyson was ripening for 
the glory that was to come. And now, when we look 
around us, and see, in England, such writers as Black- 
more, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling, and, in 
Scotland, such writers as John Watson, and Barrie, 
and William Black, and Crockett, I think that we 
may feel, — much as we reverence the genius of Dick- 
ens and Thackeray and George Eliot, and much as 
we deplore their loss, — that the time of acute mourn- 
ing for those great leaders has come to an end. 

Nor am I surprised that the present awakening of 
poetry, passion, and pathos in literature has come 
from Scotland. When, on a windy Sabbath day of 
cloud and sunshine, I have stood upon the old Calton 
hill, and, under a blue and black sky, seen the white 



9[an ^odatetu 



smoke from a thousand chimneys drifting over the 
gray city of Edinburgh; when from the breezy, fra- 
grant Braid Hills I have gazed out over the crystal 
Forth, " whose islands on its bosom lie, like emeralds 
chased with gold"; when from the gloomy height 
of the Necropolis I have looked across to ancient 
Glasgow and the gaunt and grim Cathedral of Rob 
Roy; when I have seen Dumbarton rock burst through 
the mountainous mist and frown upon the sparkling 
Clyde; when, from the slopes of Ben Cruachan, I 
have watched the sunset shadows darkening in the 
dim valleys of Glen Strae; when, just before the 
dawn, I have paused beside the haunted Cona, and 
looked up at the cold stars watching over the black 
chasms of Glencoe; and when at midnight, I have 
stood alone in the broken and ruined Cathedral of 
lona, and heard only the ghostly fluttering of the 
rooks and the murmuring surges of the desolate sea, I 
have not wondered that Scotland has all the poetry, 
and that deep in the heart of every true Scotchman 
there is a chord that trembles not alone to the im- 
mortal melodies of Burns and Scott, but to the eternal 
harmonies of Nature and of God. There may be 
countries that are more romantic and more poetical. 
I have not seen them ; and as I think of Scotland I 
echo the beautiful words of Burns : 



Still o'er the scene my mem'ry wakes, 
And fondly broods with miser care ; 

Time but th' impression deeper makes, 
As streams their channels deeper wear. 



% Wttm of %antd. 



I propose this sentiment: Scotland, its glories, its 
memories, its beauties, and its loves : and I will close 
this address with some verses of mine, expressive of 
the feeling with which I parted from the most sacred 
of Scottish shrines : 



FAREWELL TO lONA.^ 



Shrined among their crystal seas — 
Thus I saw the Hebrides : 

All the land with verdure dight; 
All the heavens flushed with light ; 

Purple jewels 'neath the tide ; 
Hill and meadow glorified ; 

Beasts at ease and birds in air ; 
Life and beauty everywhere ! 

Shrined amid their crystal seas — 
Thus I saw the Hebrides. 



Fading in the sunset smile — 
Thus I left the Holy Isle; 

Saw it slowly fade away. 
Through the mist of parting day ; 

Saw its ruins, grim and old, 
And its bastions, bathed in gold, 

1 Copyright by the Macmillan Company, of New York. 



3(an !3i^acJatcn» 23 



Rifted crag and snowy beach, 

Where the sea-gulls swoop and screech, 

Vanish, and the shadows fall, 
To the lonely curlew's call. 

Fading in the sunset smile — 
Thus I left the Holy Isle. 



As Columba, old and ill. 
Mounted on the sacred hill, 

Raising hands of faith and prayer, 
Breathed his benediction there, — 

Stricken with its solemn giace — 
Thus my spirit blessed the place: 

O'er it while the ages range. 

Time be blind and work no change! 

On its plenty be increase! 
On its homes perpetual peace! 

While around its lonely shore 
Wild winds rave and breakers roar. 

Round its blazing hearths be blent 
Virtue, comfort, and content ! 

On its beauty, passing all. 

Ne'er may blight nor shadow fall ! 

Ne'er may vandal foot intrude 
On its sacred solitude ! 



24 31 Wttst^ of Haurcl. 



May its ancient fame remain 
Glorious, and without a stain; 

And the hope that ne'er departs, 
Live within its loving hearts ! 



Slowly fades the sunset light. 
Slowly round me falls the night: 

Gone the Isle, and distant far 
All its loves and glories are; 

Yet forever, in my mind, 

Still will sigh the wand'ring wind. 

And the music of the seas, 
Mid the lonely Hebrides. 



MY LOTOS NIGHT 



' AND WHAT HAVE I TO GIVE YOU BACK, WHOSE WORTH 
MAY COUNTERPOISE THIS RICH AND PRECIOUS GIFT?" 

— SHAKESPEARE 



Cl^e ^tage ant) it^ ^po^tle^* 

speech and poem delivered before the lotos 

club, new york, at a festival in honor 

of the speaker, april 24, 1 897. 

Mr. President and Gentlemen 
OF the Lotos Club : 

THE meaning and the elements of this charming 
spectacle, — the lights, the flowers, the music, the 
gentle, eager, friendly faces, the kind and generous 
words which have been so graciously spoken, the cor- 
dial sympathy and welcome with which those words 
have been received, the many denotements, unequiv- 
ocal and decisive, of personal good will, — are as 
touching to the heart as they are lovely to the senses, 
and a fond and proud remembrance of this beautiful 
scene will abide with me as long as anything in my 
life is remembered. 

On previous occasions when I have been privileged 
to participate in festivals of the Lotos Club it has been 
my glad province to unite in homage to others : on 
the present occasion I am to thank you, — and I do 
thank you, most heartily, — for a tribute of friendship 
to myself. Gratitude is easy; but an adequate ex- 
pression of it, under the circumstances which exist, is 
well nigh impossible. The Moslems have a fanciful 
27 



28 % Wtm^ of EauteL 

belief that the soul of the Faithful, just before it enters 
into Paradise, must walk, barefooted, across a bridge 
of red-hot iron. That ordeal not inaptly typifies the 
experience of the honored guest who, at a feast like 
this, is bidden to consider his merits, must hear the 
commendation of his deeds, and must utter his thanks 
for the bounty of praise. My first impulse would be 
to declare that I have done nothing to merit this honor : 
but, without qualification, to disclaim all desert would be 
to impugn your judgment and discredit your kindness. 
The great and wise Dr. Johnson, I remember, did not 
scruple to accept the praises of his sovereign. " When 
the King had said it," he afterward remarked, " it was 
to be so." My literary life, — dating from the publi- 
cation of my first book, in Boston, in 1854, — has ex- 
tended over a period of forty-three years, thirty-seven 
of which have been passed, in active labor, in this com- 
munity. Since 1865 I have been the accredited and 
responsible representative of" The New York Tribune " 
in the department of the Drama. In the dramatic 
field, and also in the fields of Poetry, Essay, Biography 
and Travel, I have put forth my endeavors, striving to 
add something of permanent value to the literature of 
my native land. No one knows so well as I do my 
failures and my defects. But, — I have tried to follow 
the right course; I have done my best; and now, in 
the review of that long period of labor, if you, my 
friends, find anything that is worthy of approval, any- 
thing that seems, in your eyes, to justify such a testi- 
monial as thiS;, it would ill become me to repel an 
approbation which it is honorable to possess, and which 



9[^p HotOjSf 0ii^t 29 



I have labored and hoped to deserve. When the King 
has said it, it is to be so ! 

While, however, I gratefully accept and deeply value 
the honor that you have bestowed, I feel that you 
have intended something much more important and 
significant than a compliment to me. You have de- 
sired to effect a rally of stage veterans and of the 
friends of the stage, and, at a time of theatrical de- 
pression, when the fortunes of the actor seem dubious 
and perplexed, to evince, once more, your practical 
admiration for the great art of acting, your high es- 
teem for the stage as a means of social welfare, and 
your sympathy with every intellectual force that is 
arrayed for its support. The drift of your thought, 
therefore, naturally, is toward a consideration of the 
relation between the theatre and society, together with 
the province of those writers by whom that relation is 
habitually discussed. It is a wide subject, and one 
upon which there are many and sharply contrasted 
views. For my own part, I have always believed — 
of all the arts — that they are divinely commissioned 
to lead humanity, and not to follow it, and that it is 
the supreme duty of a writer to advocate, and to ex- 
ercise, a noble influence, rather than much to concern 
himself with the delivery of expert opinions upon indi- 
vidual achievement. The right principle is expressed 
in the quaint words of Emerson : 

I hold it a little matter 

Whether your jewel be of pure water, 

A rose diamond or a white, 

But whether it dazzle me with light. 



30 % Wtm^ of %mtd. 

The essential thing is the inspiration that is fluent 
from a great personahty. The passport to momentous 
and permanent victory, whether on the stage or off, is 
the salutary and ennobling strength of splendid char- 
acter. It is not enough that you possess ability; your 
ability must mean something to others, and the world 
must be exalted by it. 

Many images crowd upon the mind at such a mo- 
ment as this, and many names are remembered which 
it would be good to mention and pleasant to hear. 
My thoughts go back to my young acquaintance with 
such stage advocates as Epes Sargent and Edwin 
Percy Whipple, Henry Giles and William Clapp, Wal- 
lace Thaxter and Charles T. Congdon, Francis A. 
Durivage, Charles Fairbanks, Curtis Guild, and James 
Oakes (the friend of Forrest); and, as I think of 
them, I recall a time when Catherine Farren was the 
Juliet of my dreams, and Julia Dean the goddess of 
every youth's idolatry, and when the green curtain (in 
those days it was always green), never rose except 
upon a land of enchantment, and the roses were always 
bright by the calm Bendemeer. Much might be said 
of those old times, and much might be said of the crit- 
ical art, as it was exemplified by those old writers. 
But this is not the moment for either a memoir or an 
essay ; and, after all, experience may sometimes utter 
in a sentence the lesson of a life. As I have said 
elsewhere, — to understand human nature; to ab- 
sorb and coordinate the literature of the drama; 
to see the mental, moral, and spiritual aspect of 
the stage, and likewise to see the popular aspect of 



09p EotOiBf l^igjjt 31 



it ; to write for a public of miscellaneous readers, and 
at the same time to respect the feelings and interpret 
the ambitions of actors; to praise with discretion and 
yet with force ; to censure without asperity ; to think 
quickly and speak quickly, and yet avoid error; to op- 
pose sordid selfishness, which forever strives to degrade 
every high ideal ; to give not alone knowledge, study, 
and technical skill, but the best powers of the mind 
and the deepest feelings of the heart to the embellish- 
ment of the art of others, and to do that with an art 
of your own, — this it is to accomplish the work of the 
dramatic reviewer. It is a work of serious moment 
and incessant difficulty. But it has its bright side; 
for, as years speed on and life grows bleak and lone- 
some, it is the Stage that gives relief from paltry con- 
ventionality ; it is the Stage, with its sunshine of hu- 
mor and its glory of imagination, that wiles us away 
from our defeated ambitions, our waning fortunes, and 
the broken idols of our vanishing youth. In the long 
process of social development, — at least within the last 
three hundred years, — no other single force has borne 
a more conspicuous or a more potential part. " The 
reason of things," said Dr. South, "lies in a small com- 
pass, if a man could but find it out." The reason of 
the Drama has never been a mystery. All life has, for its 
ultimate object, a spiritual triumph. The Divine Spirit 
works in humanity by many subtle ways. It is man's 
instinctive, intuitive imitation of nature that creates ar- 
tificial objects of beauty. Those, in turn, react upon 
the human mind and deepen and heighten its sense of 
the beautiful. It is man's interpretation of humanity 



32 % IBreatU of Hautel. 

that has revealed to him his Divine Father and his 
spiritual destiny. All things work together for that 
result, — the dramatic art deeply and directly, be- 
cause, when rightly administered, it is the pure mirror 
of all that is glorious in character and all that is noble 
and gentle in the conduct of life; showing ever the 
excellence to be emulated and the glory to be gained, 
soothing our cares, dispelling our troubles, and casting 
the glamour of romantic grace upon all the common- 
places of the world. What happy dreams it has in- 
spired ! What grand ideals it has imparted ! With 
what gentle friendships it has blessed and beautified 
our lives! 

Moralists upon the Drama are fond of dwelling on 
its alleged decline from certain " palmy days " of the 
past, — a vague period which no one distinctly remem- 
bers or defines, and which still recedes, the more dili- 
gently it is pursued, " in the dark backward and abysm 
of time." One difference between the Past and the 
Present is that the stage which once lived in a camp 
now lives in a palace. Another difference is that emi- 
nent talents which once were concentrated are now 
diffused. The standard of taste has fluctuated. At 
the beginning of the century it appears to have been 
more fastidious and more intellectual than it is now, 
but not more so than it has two or three times been, 
within the intervening period. In my boyhood the 
great tragic genius of the stage was the elder Booth, 
whom I saw as Pescara, during his last engagement 
in Boston, in 1851, — and a magnificent image he was, 
of appalling power and terror. The popular sovereign. 



ar^P Hoto^ l^igjt 33 



however, was Edwin Forrest, and for many years his 
influence survived, affecting the style of such com- 
peers as Eddy, Neafie, Scott, Proctor, Kirby, and Mar- 
shall, and more or less moulding that of the romantic 
Edwin Adams, the intellectual Lawrence Barrett, and 
the gentle, generous, affectionate, stalwart John Mc- 
Cullough, " the noblest Roman of them all." In com- 
edy the prevalent tradition was that of Finn, — whom 
I never saw, but of whom I constantly heard, — but 
the actual prince was the elder Wallack ; and very soon 
after he had sparkled into splendid popularity the rosy 
gods of mirth released such messengers of happiness as 
Warren and Gilbert, Burton and Blake, Hackett and 
Fisher, Placide and Owens, and the buoyant John 
Brougham, whose memory is still cherished in all our 
hearts. A little later, — the more intellectual taste in 
tragedy gaining a sudden preeminence, from the reac- 
tion against Forrest, — the spiritual beauty and the wild 
and thrilling genius of Edwin Booth enchanted the 
public mind and captured an absolute sovereignty of 
the serious stage ; while, in comedy, the glittering figure 
of Lester Wallack bore to the front rank, and reared 
more splendidly than ever before, the standard of 
Wilks, and Lewis, and Elliston, which had been pre- 
served and transmitted by Charles Kemble, the elder 
Wallack, and both the chieftains of the house of 
Mathews. Meanwhile Murdock, Vandenhoff, E. L. 
Davenport, and the younger James Wallack main- 
tained, in royal state, the fine classic tradition of 
Kemble, Cooper, Macready, and Young; the gran- 
deur of Sarah Siddons lived again in Charlotte Cush- 



34 % HBreatl) of %mttl 

man ; and, in the realm of imaginative, romantic, human 
drama, a more exquisite artist of humor and of tears 
than ever yet had risen on our stage — an artist who is 
to Acting what Reynolds was to Painting and what 
Hood was to Poetry — carried natural portraiture to 
ideal perfection, and made illustrious the name of 
Joseph Jefferson. 

The stage, in itself, is not degenerate. The old fires 
are not yet dead. The world moves onward, and " the 
palmy days " move onward with the world. At this 
moment the public taste is fickle and the public mo- 
rality infirm ; but this moment is reactionary, and of 
course it will not last. The stage has been degraded ; 
the press has been polluted ; the church has been 
shaken; the whole fabric of society has been threat- 
ened. The assaults of materialism, blighting faith and 
discrediting romance, have had a temporary triumph. 
The dangerous delusion that there is a divinity in the 
untaught multitude has everywhere promoted disorder, 
violence, and vulgarity. So, from time to time, the 
dregs endeavor to reach the top. But all this fever 
and turmoil will pass; and, in those saner times which 
are at hand, the Stage, as we know it and love it, — 
the stage of Wignell and Dunlap, the stage of Keach 
and Barry, the stage of Wallack, and Booth, and Henry 
Irving, and Augustin Daly, the stage that, in our day, 
has been adorned by Rachel, Ristori, Seebach, Jan- 
auschek, and Modjeska, and by Adelai Neilson 
and Mary Anderson (twin stars of loveliness, the one 
all passion and sorrow, the other all innocence, light, 
and joy !), the stage that possesses the wild, poetic 



2t9p Eoto^ mm* 35 



beauty and rare, elusive, celestial spirit of Ellen Terry, 
and the enchanting womanhood and blithe, gleeful, 
tender human charm of Ada Rehan, the stage that 
is consecrated to intellect, genius and beauty, — will 
again assert its splendid power, and will again rejoice 
in all the honors, and manifest all the inherent virtues, 
of the stage of our forefathers, in the best of their 
golden days. 

But I detain you too long from voices more eloquent 
than mine, and thoughts more worthy. There is little 
more to be said. My career as an active writer about 
the stage may, perhaps, be drawing to a close. It has 
covered the period of more than one generation ; it has 
been freighted with exacting responsibility; it has 
been iiiexpressibly laborious ; and its conclusion would 
cause me no regret. I have no enmities, and if ever 
in my life I have wounded any heart, I have done 
so without intention, and I hope that my error may 
be forgiven. For the rest, I should exactly express 
my feelings, if I might venture to use the words of 
Landor : 

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife ; 

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art ; 
I warmed both hands against Jhe fire of life : 

It sinks, and I am ready to depart. 



Let me close this response with some Hnes that I 
have written, remembering other days and other faces, 
now hidden behind the veil, and remembering that 
for me also the curtain soon may fall : 



2,6 % mtt&t)^ of Hautd* 



MEMORY. 1 



A tangled garden, bleak and dry 
And silent 'neath a dark'ning sky, 
Is all that barren Age retains 
Of costly Youth's superb domains. 
Mute in its bosom, cold and lone, 
A dial watches, on a stone ; 
The vines are sere, the haggard boughs 
In dusky torpor dream and drowse ; 
The paths are deep with yellow leaves, 
In which the wind of evening grieves ; 
And up and down, and to and fro. 
One pale gray shadow wanders slow. 

II. 
When now the fading sunset gleams 
Across a glimm'ring waste of dreams ; 
When now the shadows eastward fall. 
And twilight hears the curlew's call ; 
When blighted now the lily shows, 
And no more bloom is on the rose ; 
What phantom of the dying day 
Shall gild the wanderer's sombre way — 
What new illusion of delight — 
What magic, ushering in the night ? 
For, deep beneath the proudest will 
The heart must have its solace still. 

III. 
Ah, many a hope too sweet to last 
Is in that garden of the Past, 
And many a flower that once was fair 
Lies cold and dead and wither'd there; 

^ Copyright by the Macmillan Company, of New York. 



^ %m^ ^mt^ 37 



Youth's promise, trusted Friendship's bliss, 
Fame's laurel, Love's enraptured kiss, 
Beauty and strength — the spirit's wings — 
And the glad sense of natural things. 
And times that smile, and times that weep — 
All shrouded in the cells of sleep ; 
While o'er them careless zephyrs pass. 
And sunbeams, in the rustling grass. 



So ends it all : but never yet 
Could the true heart of love forget. 
And grander sway was never known 
Than his who reigns on Memory's throne ! 
Though grim the threat and dark the frown 
With which the pall of night comes down, 
Though all the scene be drear and wild, 
Life once was precious, once it smiled. 
And in his dream he lives again 
With ev'ry joy that crowned it then. 
And no remorse of time can dim 
The splendor of the Past for him ! 



The sea that round his childhood played 

Still makes the music once it made, 

And still in Fancy's chambers sing 

The breezes of eternal Spring ; 

While, thronging Youth's resplendent track. 

The princes and the queens come back, 

And everywhere the dreary mould 

Breaks into Nature's green and gold ! 

It is not night — or, if it be, 

So let the night descend for me, 

When Mem'ry's radiant dream shall cease, 

Slow lapsing into perfect peace. 



ACTING AND WRITING 



VL^t 9!ntellectual ^tanuarn in 
acting ann mntin^. 

SPEECH DELIVERED BEFORE THE ACTORS' FUND 

SOCIETY, AT THE GARRICK THEATRE, NEW YORK, 

JUNE 8, 1897. 

Mr. President and Ladies and Gentlemen : 

IT is an honor and a pleasure to be permitted to par- 
ticipate in this festival of art, taste, scholarship 
and friendship, within the limits of the dramatic pro- 
fession, and I thank you for the kindness with which 
my name has been greeted. After about forty years 
of continuous public service, as a reviewer of the acted 
Drama and as an essayist on the art of acting and 
on the achievements of actors, I hope it will not be 
considered a presumption if I venture to speak of 
myself as a friend of the stage. In that capacity I 
respond, as well as I may, to this summons — in that 
capacity and that alone. 

The fact that an old professional reviewer of the 
drama is asked to say a word, on this occasion, seems 
to imply that some among you are mindful of the re- 
lation which exists between the stage and its review- 
ers, and are willing to remember it with kindness, at 
this time. For my part, I wish that the relation be- 
tween actor and commentator might always be viewed 
as one of sympathy, and always remembered with 

9 41 



42 311 l^teatjj of %mtth 

kindness. Upon both sides there are, perhaps, some- 
what mistaken views. " All the world's a stage," — 
but the stage is not all the world. The press is a 
power, — but the destiny enwrapt in character is 
a greater power than the press. Actors sometimes 
expect too much. Writers sometimes assume both 
omniscience and omnipotence. A little moderation 
might promote that fraternal feeling which certainly is 
desirable between the professors of kindred arts. 

Upon the province of the stage it is not needful for 
me here to expatiate. Upon the province of the press 
my views are, perhaps, somewhat peculiar. If I were 
to suggest a line of thought, I should declare that the 
function of the press is, first, to furnish the news, and, 
secondly, to comment upon it in such a way as to 
guide the public taste and opinion toward practical 
favor of all things which are good. No writer can 
either make or unmake the reputation of an actor. 
He may accelerate the success of merit or the failure 
of vain pretense, but he can neither suppress the one 
nor sustain the other. Words are powerful, not be- 
cause they are spoken, but because they are true; and 
it is in the wise, clear, and cogent exposition of princi- 
ples that truth makes itself practically felt. Personal 
praise and personal censure have little, if any, serious 
effect — for no one regards them. " What harm does 
it do to a man," said Dr. Johnson, " to call him Holo- 
fernes ? " The proper critic for most actors is the 
stage manager. It is only the exceptional person, in 
any art, who incarnates those influences which make 
that art important to society, and thus render it a 



cutting anb 3©ntmg» 43 

proper subject of public discussion. Actors ought not 
to read anything that is printed about themselves, 
whether it be good, bad, or indifferent. Upon the 
one hand, printed commendation may prove an incen- 
tive to vanity, — which usually needs no encourage- 
ment, — while, on the other hand, printed censure is 
sure to prove a depressing and enervating influence. 

Early in my life (I do not speak as an actor, but as 
a writer), the poet Longfellow, at whose fireside I was 
often a guest, said to me: " I receive many reviews of 
my writings. I look at the beginning, and if I find that 
an article is agreeable, I read it through ; if not, I drop 
it into my fire, and that is an end of the worry. You 
are at the beginning of your career. Never read un- 
pleasant criticisms, and never answer an attack." I 
took that counsel to heart. I haye never answered an 
attack, and it is many years since I have read any 
reference to myself in print. I have a vague impres- 
sion that references occur, — sometimes friendly and 
sometimes hostile, — but I have kept myself in igno- 
rance of almost all of them, and thus I have been able 
to do my work in comparative peace. My advice to 
actors has always been to take the same course, — to 
avoid all reviews, my own included. 

Discussion of the stage is intended not for actors, 
but for readers, and it fulfils its purpose, — almost the 
only purpose it can fulfil, — when it interests the 
reader in the subject. Individual actors may some- 
times be wounded by an exposition of principles of 
art : that is almost inevitable : but the greatest service 
any writer can render to the Drama is to oppose, — at 



44 % Wttatt^ Of Haurd* 

all times and with all his strength, — those influences 
which tend to degrade its intellectual standards. A 
few examples will enforce my meaning. About 1861 
Charles Fechter appeared upon the English stage 
and gave an extraordinary performance of Hamlet. 
It subsequently (1869-70) reached America. It was 
"the rage" upon both sides of the sea. In a techni- 
cal sense it was a performance of ability, but it was 
chiefly remarkable for light hair and bad English. 
Fanny Kemble tells a story of a lady who, at a dinner 
in London, was asked by a neighboring guest whether 
she had seen Mr. Fechter as Hamlet. " No," she 
said, " I have not ; and I think I should not care to 
hear the English blank verse spoken by a foreigner." 
The inquirer gazed meditatively upon his plate for 
some time, and then he said, " But Hamlet zvas a for- 
eigner, was n't he ? " That is the gist of the whole 
matter. We were to have the manner of" nature," in 
blank verse. We were to have Hamlet in light hair, 
because Danes are sometimes blonde. We were to 
have the great soliloquy on life and death omitted, 
because it stops the action of the play.i We were to 
have the blank verse turned into a foreigner's broken 
English prose. We were to have Hamlet crossing his 
legs, upon the gravestone, as if he were Sir Charles 
Coldstream ; and this was to be " nature." Mr. Fech- 
ter's plan may have been finely executed, but it was 
radically wrong, and it could not rightly be accepted. 

1 Mr. Fechter did not discard that soliloquy, but he expressed, to Lester 
Wallack, — who mentioned it to me, — his opinion that the omission of that 
passage would be advantageous to the movement of the play ; and he always 
spoke it as if it were prose. 



Acting anb l^titing* 45 

Some courage was required to oppose it, because Mr. 
Fechter had come to us (to me among others), person- 
ally commended by no less a man than the great 
Charles Dickens. A little later we had " the blonde " 
craze. Horace Greeley once said to me : " Mr. Win- 
ter, what is a blonde ? What is it like ? " " Sir," I 
said, "it is an exuberant young female who has 
bleached her hair, in order to resemble an albino, and 
who sings, dances, and prattles nonsense." A little 
later came the " Black Crook " craze — the semi-nude 
figure and the red-fire spectacle. Those things were 
not intrinsically injurious. I have never known sound 
moral instincts to be corrupted by anything on the 
stage. But those forces were injurious to the art of 
acting and to " the legitimate drama," in which I devot- 
edly believe, and therefore it was right and necessary 
to oppose them. A little later came the great Salvini, 
a man of remarkable powers, of extraordinary phy- 
sique, of vast experience, and of a colossal reputation. 
He performed Othello — and he gave a radically 
wrong performance. Half of it was grossly animal 
and sensual, and the other half of it was hideously fe- 
rocious. You cannot find that Moor in the pages of 
Shakespeare. It was impossible to resist the power 
of Salvini's executive dramatic genius; but his stan- 
dard was radically wrong, for the English classic 
drama, and therefore it was rightly opposed ; for if the 
physical method of Salvini be correct, all the traditions 
of the English stage are useless, and every student ot 
Shakespeare, from Coleridge to Dowden, has gone 
astray. Next, out of France, came Sarah Bernhardt, 



46 % Wtmtt^ of Eaiurd* 

a woman of rare powers and large experience, who, al- 
most invariably, with an iteration not less astonishing 
than deplorable, devoted her genius to the exposition 
of the most pernicious and hateful ideal of woman 
that can be imagined — the woman who is radically 
depraved, sensual, carnal, and base, and whose loath- 
some career of appetite and crime culminates in mur- 
der and terminates in violent death. The skill with 
which that ideal was presented impressed many 
people as marvellous. The effect of it was that ot 
distress, horror, and aversion, — causing the specta- 
tor to remember the theatre, not as a temple of beauty, 
but as a hospital or a madhouse. Latest of all these 
dramatic " fads " came a series of unfragrant plays, 
exploiting the relation of the blackguard and the 
demirep, calling it "a social problem," and causing no 
better effect than a profound disgust for human nature, 
together with the domestic embarrassment of awk- 
ward questions at breakfast. Other examples might 
be cited, but these suffice. Opposition to the fancy 
of the hour may, at the moment, seem unwise and 
unkind, but, in the long run, it is seen to be right; for 
the principles of dramatic art do not change; the 
moral law is inexorable; and the duty of the critic, 
at all times, is to protect the stage against every 
wrong and bad influence, and to maintain and insist 
that acting can achieve the best results, and rise to the 
highest summits, and still remain within the limits of 
good breeding and good taste. 

It was lately my fortune to be greatly honored by 
the Lotos Club, of New York, with a complimentary 



cutting anb Hunting* 47 

banquet, the gracious tribute of friendly persons, who 
see that Time has showered me with silver, and who, 
as they think of many farewells, may perhaps have 
reflected that yet another is not far away. As I 
looked around upon those crowded tables I could not 
but notice that the countenances were mostly those of 
strangers ; but I saw, as in a vision, the faces of more 
than a hundred actors, men and women of the past, 
all of whom were my personal friends; all of whom 
would gladly have been present; all of whom were 
gone! And the tender lines of Uhland floated into 
my mind : 

Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee, — 

Take, I give it willingly ; 

For, invisible to thee, 

Spirits twain have crossed with me. 

What was the peculiarity of those actors of the 
Past? Their peculiarity was that, with little excep- 
tion, they were engaged in doing noble things. They 
aimed at splendid intellectual results. Is that the 
case, to any considerable extent, upon the American 
stage to-day ? And if it be not the case to-day, why 
should it not be? The same human nature exists. 
The sunrise and the sunset are still beautiful. Youth 
and innocence and goodness are as much in the world 
as they ever were. Art is still subtle ; genius is still 
sublime; and still the fires of love and hope are burn- 
ing with immortal splendor on the living altars of the 
human heart. 

It is said that we cling too much to the Past. Well, 
some of us, perhaps, do. It was noticed by Patrick 



48 311 Wteatf^ of %mttl 

Henry that " the past at least is secure." What else 
have we got, to cling to ? The past is the glory of 
Greece and of Rome. The past is the splendid 
civilization and the matchless literature of England. 
The past is Shakespeare, and Milton, and Byron, and 
Scott, and Wordsworth, and Burns, and Shelley, and 
Coleridge, and Tennyson. The past is Burbage, 
and Betterton, and Garrick, and Kemble, and Kean, 
and Macready, and Forrest, and Davenport, and 
Cushman, and Edwin Booth — and all the rest of that 
long line of superb actors by whom your profession 
has been ennobled and adorned. And just as we 
travel in foreign lands to absorb the beauty that 
we would reproduce and perpetuate in our own, so 
we love and venerate and study the past, in order, by 
its lessons of grandeur and of grace, to advance, to 
ennoble, and to consecrate the present. 



THE ANCIENT GLORIES OF THE 
ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 



Cl^e ancient (lE>lorie0 of 
Cl^e iSoman Catl^olic €l)mc^. 

speech and poem at a festival in honor of judge 
joseph f, daly, given by the catholic club, 
new york, november 6, 1897. 

Mr. President and Gentlemen of 
THE Catholic Club : 

SPEECH is said to be silver, silence to be golden, 
and since I was ever a believer in the gold stan- 
dard, it would be my preference to remain silent, — to 
listen, not to speak. But, since you wish it to be 
otherwise, I will say a few words, to thank you for your 
kind greeting and for the pleasure of participating in 
your festival. It is a festival with which I deeply 
sympathize, — because its purpose is to express affec- 
tion for a beloved comrade, and to pay a tribute of 
honor to a noble gentleman. For the privilege of 
being present on this occasion I am indebted to no 
merit of my own, but to a long-existent friendship 
with your distinguished guest, — a friendship which, 
beginning thirty years ago, has never known a single 
passing cloud, but has grown ever lovelier and more 
precious as those years have drifted away. Your kind 
invitation, accordingly, came to me more as a com- 
mand than a request ; and also, let me add, consid- 
51 



52 % Wtmf^ of atautri- 

ering the name and the character of your club, it came 
to me with irresistible allurement. 

The bond of your society, as I comprehend it, is 
not only that of friendship, but that of religion. Be- 
hind the Catholic Club stands the Catholic Church, 
and to think of the Catholic Church is to think of the 
oldest, the most venerable, and the most powerful in- 
stitution existing among men. I am not a churchman, 
of any kind : that, possibly, is my misfortune : but I 
am conscious of a profound obligation of gratitude to 
that wise, august, austere, yet tenderly human eccle- 
siastical power which, self-centred amid the vicis- 
situdes of human affairs, and provident for men of 
learning, imagination, and sensibility throughout the 
world, has preserved the literature and art of all the 
centuries, has made architecture the living symbol of 
celestial aspiration, and, in poetry and in music, has 
heard, and has transmitted, the authentic voice of God. 
I say that I am not a churchman; but I would also 
say that the best hours of my life have been hours of 
meditation passed in the glorious cathedrals and 
among the sublime ecclesiastical ruins of England. I 
have worshipped in Canterbury and York; in Win- 
chester and Salisbury; in Lincoln and Durham; in 
Ely, and in Wells. I have stood in Tintern, when 
the green grass and the white daisies were waving in 
the summer wind, and have looked upon those gray 
and russet walls, and upon those lovely arched case- 
ments, — among the most graceful ever devised by hu- 
man art, — round which the sheeted ivy droops, and 
through which the winds of heaven sing a perpetual 



€j)c 0oman Catjjolic 4lljiu:c8» 53 

requiem. I have seen the shadows of evening slowly 
gather and softly fall, over the gaunt tower, the roof- 
less nave, the giant pillars, and the shattered arcades 
of Fountains Abbey, in its sequestered and melancholy 
solitude, where ancient Ripon dreams, in the spacious 
and verdant valley of the Skell. I have mused upon 
Netley^ and Kirkstall, and Newstead, and Bolton, and 
Melrose, and Dryburgh. And, at a midnight hour, 
I have stood in the grim and gloomy chancel of 
St. Columba's Cathedral, remote in the storm-swept 
Hebrides, and looked upward to the cold stars, and 
heard the voices of the birds of night, mingled with 
the desolate moaning of the sea. With awe, with 
reverence, with many strange and wild thoughts, I 
have lingered and pondered in those haunted, holy 
places; but one remembrance was always present, — 
the remembrance that it was the Catholic Church that 
created those forms of beauty, and breathed into them 
the breath of a divine life, and hallowed them forever ; 
and, thus thinking, I have felt the unspeakable pathos 
of her long exile from the temples that her passionate 
devotion prompted and her loving labor reared. 

It was natural, therefore, that I should be allured 
by your invitation, — should be attracted to the votaries 
of this Catholic Club, to whom such relics are sacred, 
and to whom such thoughts, however inadequate, may 
not seem entirely vain. It was especially natural that 
I should be attracted to this society, assembled to 
honor an old friend, who, in every walk of life, has 
borne himself with dignity and ability, and who stands 
now, without blemish and without reproach, at the 



54 ^ IBreatU of Hautd* 

white summit of his noble career. Rich in scholar- 
ship, copious and delicate in humor, accomplished 
in jurisprudence, eloquent, faithful, and just, Judge 
Daly merits every plaudit that respect can prompt or 
love can utter. I am indeed grateful to be allowed to 
add my humble homage to your more eloquent and 
more worthy tribute. In my youth I was a lawyer, a 
member of the Suffolk bar, in Boston (though never in 
practice), when Goodrich and Loring, Hallett and 
Prince, Bartlett and Rufus Choate contended in the 
forum, and when Nash, and Bigelow, and Metcalf, and 
Shaw were illustrious upon the bench. Joel Parker, 
Emory Washburn, and Theophilus Parsons had been 
my teachers ; and, if I learned nothing else in those 
distant days, I learned to reverence the glorious science 
of the Law, and to appreciate the attributes of a great 
jurist. 

It is a comfort to think that such homage as you are 
offering to-night has not been withheld till it could no 
longer gratify the mind or cheer the heart of the 
friend whom you delight to honor. Tributes of this 
kind, amid the tumult of our busy civilization, are not 
too frequent. The day declines; the darkness draws 
on; the Old Guard is fast passing away. Its mem- 
bers may well be mindful of each other, while there is 
yet time. I did not intend a speech, but only to ex- 
press my sympathy and my gratitude; and I cannot 
more fully say what I feel than by repeating one ot 
my poems, which, although not originally intended 
for an occasion, may, perhaps, be considered appro- 
priate here. It is called 



€f)e toman (ITatlJoIic Cgurcft* 55 



THE SIGNAL LIGHT.i 

The lonely sailor, when the night 

O'er ocean's glimm'ring waste descends, 

Sets at the peak his signal light. 
And fondly dreams of absent friends. 

Starless the sky above him broods. 

Pathless the waves beneath him swell ; 

Through peril's spectral solitudes 
That beacon flares — and all is well. 

So, on the wand'ring sea of years, 
When now the evening closes round, 

I show the signal flame that cheers. 
And scan the wide horizon's bound. 

The night is dark, the winds are loud, 
The black waves follow, fast and far ; 

Yet soon may flash, through mist and cloud, 
The radiance of some answ'ring star. 

Haply across the shuddering deep. 
One moment seen, a snowy sail 

May dart with one impetuous leap, 
And pass with one exultant hail ! 

And I shall dearly, sweetly know. 

Though storm be fierce and ocean drear. 

That somewhere still the roses blow. 

And hearts are true, and friends are near. 

Each separate on the eternal main. 
We seek the same celestial shore ; 

Sometimes we part to meet again, 
Sometimes we part to meet no more. 

1 Copyright by the Macmillan Company, of New York. 



s6 % nateatf) of %mtd. 



Ah, comrades, prize the gracious day 
When sunshine bathes the tranquil tide. 

And, careless as a child at play, 

Our ships drift onward, side by side ! 

Too oft, with cold and barren will, 

And stony pride of iron sway, 
We bid the voice of love be still, 

And thrust the cup of joy away. 

No comfort haunts the yellow leaf! 

Wait not till, broken, old and sere. 
The sad heart pines, in hopeless grief. 

For one sweet voice it used to hear. 

Thought has its throne and Power its glow, 
And Wealth its time of transient ease ; 

But best of hours that life can know 
Are rose-crowned hours that fleet like these. 

Let laughter leap from every lip ! 

To music turn the perfumed air ! 
Ye golden pennons, glance and dip ! 

Ye crimson banners, flash and flare ! 

On them no more the tempest glooms 
Whose freed and royal spirits know 

To frolic where the lilac blooms 
And revel where the roses blow ! 

But lights of heaven above them kiss. 

As over silver seas they glide — 
One heart, one hope, one fate, one bliss — 

To peace and silence, side by side. 



JOSEPH JEFFERSON 



THE POET AND THE ACTOR. 

speech and poem at a dinner in honor of 

joseph jefferson, given by the colonial 

club of new york, march 31, 1 898. 

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the 
Colonial Club : 

I AM indeed grateful for the privilege of participa- 
tion in this beautiful tribute of affection and honor 
to a great actor and a noble person, and I heartily 
thank you for the kind welcome with which the mention 
of my name has been received. As I gaze upon this im- 
pressive spectacle, as I consider the motive that has 
prompted this assemblage and the spirit with which it 
is animated — a motive and a spirit suggestive and 
stimulative of all high thought and noble emotion — I 
can but regret that no power of eloquence is within 
my reach, fitly to express the meaning of this scene or 
the feeling which it inspires. Something, however, I 
would say of the many precious memories that throng 
upon my mind, and especially of one memory, that 
comes upon me with peculiar force at this time, of a 
great personal, representative experience. I am think- 
59 



6o % Wtm^ of ^laurel. 

ing of a lovely summer night, more than twenty years 
ago, in the old town of Stratford-upon-Avon, in the 
heart of England. The sky was cloudless ; the winds 
were hushed ; the river was flowing sweetly, like 
music heard in a dream ; and, as the knell of midnight 
floated away from the dark and venerable tower, the 
ancient streets, so quaint and so cleanly, were vacant 
and silent, under the cold light of the stars ; and pres- 
ently the comrade of my walk, laying his hand gently 
upon my arm, said to me, in a low and reverent tone, 
that I shall never forget, " This is the place." We 
were standing before the house in which Shakespeare 
was bom, and my companion was Joseph Jefferson. 
Most men, under such circumstances, would have 
spoken much : my wise and gentle friend said those 
few simple words, and said no more. For a long time 
we stood there, in silence, and then, silently, we walked 
away. The remembrance of that solemn hour is often 
in my thoughts ; for as I look back across the long 
period of our friendship — a period of well nigh forty 
years — it seems to me that, not once but many times, 
he has been present, at supreme moments of my life, 
still leading me to shrine after shrine of nobility and 
beauty, and still saying to me, in the same spirit of 
sympathy, awe, reverence, and worship, " This is the 
place." 

It sometimes happens that one man is divinely or- 
dained to be a guide and a blessing to others. We do 
not well understand either the source or the nature of 
his celestial faculty, but we call it poetic genius, and we 
accept it with gratitude and with delight. Joseph 



So^ei^l) ^t^et^m. ex 



Jefferson has exercised poetic genius in the art of 
acting, and in that way he has been a guide and a 
blessing to thousands of people, all over the English- 
speaking world. It was not only natural, it was inevi- 
table, that this great actor should dedicate his life to 
the service of poetry and beauty, for that mission was 
his inheritance. In the long artistic annals of his race, 
extending over a period of more than one hundred 
and fifty years, each succeeding picture is one of ever- 
growing romance and renown. The baleful echoes of 
Culloden were still sounding across the Scottish bor- 
der, when young Thomas Jefferson rode from Ripon 
to London — there to become an actor in the company 
of Garrick, and to found the Jefferson family of actors 
upon the stage. Washington was President of the 
United States when, crossing the Atlantic, in quest of 
fame and fortune, the second Jefferson began his career 
in the American theatre — a career that bore him to 
the highest eminence, and hallowed his name not only 
with admiration, but with love. The American stage 
had felt the impetus, and had begun to rise and 
broaden under the influence of Cooper, Edwin For- 
rest, the elder Wallack and the elder Booth, when the 
third Jefferson obtained and held an honorable place 
among the actors and managers of his day. An 
auspicious fate, amid the horrors of the San Domingo 
rebellion of Toussaint L'Ouverture, spared and saved 
the lovely girl who was destined to become, in the 
ripe maturity of her beneficent womanhood, the mother 
of the fourth Jefferson, and thus to enrich our civiliza- 
tion and to bless our lives with the consummate 



62 % Wtt&t^ of %antth 

comedian whom, this night, we are assembled to 
honor. Thus through succeeding generations that 
legacy of genius has been transmitted and that minis- 
try of beauty has been prolonged. The first Jefferson, 
dead for ninety years and more, sleeps in the shadow 
of the gray cathedral of Ripon. Not many months 
ago it was my fortune to stand beside his grave, on 
which the grass was rippling and the sunbeams were 
at play ; and as I gazed upon that scene of peace I 
could but reflect upon the brilliant days of David Gar- 
rick and Margaret Woffington, when that sleeper was 
in the pride and glory of his youth, with Dodd and 
Bannister for his comrades, and Fanny Abington for 
his sweetheart, and Edmund Burke and Goldsmith 
and Gibbon and Doctor Johnson for his auditors. 
But the past is always blended with the present, and 
nothing in this world is ever ended here. At this mo- 
ment I am carrying a little box of golden shell which 
once was owned and carried by the poet Byron, dead 
since 1824, and in it there is a piece of the hair of 
Sarah Siddons, the idolized actress of her age, dead 
since 1831 ; and you, to-night, hearing the voice of 
Joseph Jefferson, have heard a living echo from the 
great English days of Queen Anne, when Bolingbroke 
led the senate and Marlborough led the field, when 
Gibber was bearing the sceptre of comedy, when Con- 
greve was writing his plays and Fielding his novels, 
and when poetry commingled thought and fancy, 
philosophy and satire, imagery and wit, in the melo- 
dious cadences of Prior and in the crystal couplets 
and the burning rhetoric of Pope. 



Sloisfejj^ Si^i^^on* 63 



In the days of Robert Wilks, and in the later days 
of Spranger Barry and David Garrick, there were but 
two important theatres in England, and all the good 
actors were concentrated in one or the other of those 
two houses. In the days of Hodgkinson and Anne 
Brunton in America there were but three important 
theatres in the whole country. In our day the thea- 
tres are numerous, and the good actors are widely 
scattered and diffused. There is a public for tainted 
trash and tinkling nonsense, but there is also a public 
for the noblest poetry and the finest art ; and when 
we remember the one we shall be wise not to forget 
the other. You are all familiar, no doubt, with the 
reply of the old woman to the minister who had asked 
for her opinion upon the doctrine of total depravity, 
" It is an excellent doctrine," she said, " if people would 
only live up to it." At the present time there are indi- 
cations that the people who support some of the thea- 
tres are living up to that doctrine, in the fullest degree. 
While, however, we observe the prominence of theatri- 
cal trash, we must not ignore the golden record of 
dramatic art. Charlotte Cushman and Mrs. Bowers, 
Edwin Booth and Lester Wallack, Lawrence Barrett 
and John McCullough, Mary Anderson and Ada 
Rehan, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, Charles Cogh- 
lan and John Hare, each and all presenting works of 
the highest character, have, each and all, obtained the 
amplest recognition and the most brilliant success ; and 
Joseph Jefferson, after a career of more than sixty 
years, is the most admired, the most beloved, and the 
most popular of all the actors of his time. No fact 



64 % Wttstfy of %antd. 

could possess more significance nor convey a more 
practical encouragement; for this great actor has 
never paltered with falsehood, nor sacrificed the right 
to the expedient, nor addressed the baser public, nor 
taken his law from the multitude; but, from first to 
last, he has been true to his mission, as an apostle of 
poetry and beauty. In earlier years, as some among 
my hearers are aware, he acted scores of parts, long 
since discarded and forgotten, but for a long time he 
has wisely restricted himself to characters in which he 
is peerless. Chief among those characters is Rip Van 
Winkle; and when I mention that name I call up 
before you the blithest, the most romantic, the most 
pathetic figure of the modern stage. All the extremes 
of life are comprised in Rip Van Winkle: youth and 
age, laughter and tears, happiness and misery, the 
natural and the preternatural. Even the environment 
is composed of contrasts, for it passes from the " settled 
low content " of the rustic cabin to the desolate moun- 
tain peak, solitary beneath the awful loneliness of the 
empty sky. Other actors played the part before Jeffer- 
son played it — Flynn and Parsons, Chapman and 
Hackett, Yates, Isherwood, and Burke — and other 
actors, no doubt, will play it, when he is gone : but no 
other actor ever invested it with the charm which is 
the magic of Jefferson — the charm of poetry. In that 
one word is the secret of his victory and the reason of 
his greatness. It cannot be analyzed — for poetry is 
elusive, and not to be captured by a definition. We 
only know that it arouses the imagination, touches the 
heart, and ennobles the mind. Some persons indeed 



3[o^q^j) Slrffer^on* 65 



there are to whom it speaks in vain. Standing before 
one of the pictures of Turner, a censorious artist said 
to that great master: " I cannot see such color as that 
in nature." " No," said Turner, " you cannot see it; 
don't you wish you could?" Happy the man who 
possesses humor to cheer and beautify his passage 
through this mortal life, and poetry, to open upon his 
spiritual vision the promise and the glory of the life to 
come ! I have passed the most of my days in the 
study of human nature and in the observance of those 
artistic forces which, from all directions, are liberated 
to act upon mankind ; and I declare, as the result of 
all that I have seen and known, that the mission of art 
is the revelation and interpretation of beauty, and that 
the chief obligation of the artist, whatever be his field, 
is to show the ideal to be emulated, and not the horror 
to be shunned. Joseph Jefferson has fulfilled that ob- 
ligation, and in doing that he has lived a beneficent 
life and has crowned his honored age with the love of 
his fellow-men and with the spotless laurel of an illus- 
trious renown. 

Not very long ago I wrote a poem in honor of Jef- 
ferson, but I have never spoken it in his presence. 
Let me so far encroach upon your kindness as to re- 
peat it now : 



66 % Wtm^ of %mtd. 



JEFFERSON.i 

The songs that should greet him are songs of the mountain — 
No sigh of the pine-tree that murmurs and grieves, 

But the music of streams rushing swift from their fountain, 
And the soft gale of spring through the sun-spangled leaves. 

In the depth of the forest it woke from its slumbers — 
His genius, that holds every heart in its thrall ! 

Beside the bright torrent he learned his first numbers — 
The thrush's sweet cadence, the meadow-lark's call. 

O'er his cradle kind Nature — that Mother enchanted 
Of Beauty and Art — cast her mantle of grace ; 

In his eyes lit her passion, and deeply implanted 

In his heart her strong love for the whole human race. 

Like the rainbow that pierces the clouds where they darken, 

He came, ev'ry sorrow and care to beguile : 
He spoke — and the busy throng halted to harken ; 

He smiled — and the world answered back with a smile. 

Like the sunburst of April, with mist drifting after, 
When in shy, woodland places the daisy uprears. 

He blessed ev'ry bosom with innocent laughter — 
The more precious because it was mingled with tears. 

Like the rose by the wayside, so simple and tender, 
His art was — to win us because he was true ; 

We thought not of greatness, or wisdom, or splendor — 
We loved him — and loving was all that we knew ! 

He would heed the glad voice of the summer leaves, shaken 
By the gay wind of morning that sports through the trees — 

Ah, how shall we bid that wild music awaken. 

And thrill to his heart, with such accents as these ? 

1 Copyright by the Macmillan Company, of New York. 



g[o^ej>|) 3[ete!6fon» e^ 



How utter the honor and love that we bear him — 
The High Priest of Nature, the Master confest — 

How proudly yet humbly revere, and declare him 
The Prince of his Order, the brightest and best ! 

Ah, vain are all words ! But as long as life's river 
Through sunshine and shadow rolls down to the sea ; 

While the waves dash in music, forever and ever ; 
While clouds drift in glory, and sea-birds are free ; 

So long shall the light and the bloom and the gladness 
Of nature's great heart his ordainment proclaim. 

And its one tender thought of bereavement and sadness 
Be the sunset of time over Jefferson's fame. 



II 

ACADEMIC SPEECHES 

1 891-1896 



' AND WHAT ARE ALL THE PRIZES WON 

TO youth's enchanted view ? 

AND what is all THE MAN HAS DONE; 
TO WHAT THE BOY MAY DO ?" 

— OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 



YOUTH AND OPPORTUNITY 



goutl^ and C^pportunit^* 

SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE THEATRE IN STAPLETON, 
STATEN ISLAND, JUNE 19, 1891. 

AS I look upon the faces of these young students, I 
j7\. do not perceive in them any sign of insuperable 
reluctance that our oratorical exploits should be cut 
short. Nor does that surprise me. Young people 
may not always be studious of books, but they are al- 
ways studious of change. They do not consciously 
value the present ; they crave the future. Nothing in 
the passing moment suffices for the youthful mind, — 
which looks ever toward the joy that is promised and 
the hour that is to come. I remember my experience 
when I was a school-boy, in far-off years, in the old 
city of Boston, — how often it happened, on a summer 
afternoon, as I sat in the school-room and, gazing 
through the open windows, saw the green, waving 
branches of the great elms, and the long, fresh grass 
rippling in sun and breeze, that my thoughts would 
drift away from the teacher, and the task, and the hum 
of study, winging their flight across the sparkling crys- 
tal of Boston's beautiful harbor, to Fort Independence, 
and Governor's Island, and Point Shirley, and the 
rest of those engirdling jewels — 

The isles that were the Hesperides 
Of all my youthful dreams. 

13 73 



74 ^ J^rcatD of laurel 

So true is it, — and ever has been, and ever will be, — 
as your poet Longfellow has told you, that 

A boy's will is the wind's will, 
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. 

Long as they are, however, they are not long enough 
to reach and grasp the great and golden fact, which can 
only be learned by experience, that there is no blessing 
in life so precious as the Opportunity of Youth. Shades 
of the prison-house may indeed begin to gather, as the 
poet Wordsworth says they do, about the growing boy : 
yet now, if ever, he possesses freedom. Care has not 
laid its burden on his spirit. Doubt has not chilled 
his hope. Worldly strife has not embittered his mind. 
Everything that comes to him now comes with a smile. 
Never yet has he heard, in the silence of his sorrow- 
ing soul, those words which are the saddest in human 
speech: " It is too late." Does any youth ever realize 
his privilege? Does any youth ever reflect and 
comprehend that this is the period when defects of 
character may be modified or removed ; when errors 
of conduct may be avoided, and sometimes may be 
repaired ; when the mind may be fed with knowledge 
and the soul exalted with beauty ; when " the world 
is all before him, where to choose " ? The almost uni- 
versal testimony of dejection and regret, in mature 
years, is the melancholy answer. " If I could only be 
young once more," cries the veteran, " if I could only 
live my life over again, how different it would be ! " 

Not that the days of childhood and school are the 
best days! That notion is only one of the many 



§dutf) anb <i^jrpottunitp» 75 

prosperous platitudes that conventional usage has 
made respectable. ** Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis 
folly to be wise." But ignorance is not always bliss. 
Knowledge sometimes is bliss — and where knowledge 
is bliss 'tis folly to be ignorant. These beginners, 
these young adventurers upon the ocean of life, I 
doubt not, have many days in store for themselves, 
brighter and happier than any that ever yet they have 
known — days when, with developed and matured 
faculties and the ample equipments of learning, taste, 
and experience, they enter into the kingdom of wis- 
dom, which is power; of love, which is life; of ac- 
tive virtue, which is honor, conquest, glory, success ! 
But the surpassing privilege of youth is the unfettered 
spirit, the uncompromised intellect, the boundless op- 
portunity. The page is yet unsullied. The pathway 
lies clear and open in the sunshine. The blue heaven 
rears its dome of splendor and of promise, without 
one cloud to hint of peril or storm. And, even as 
now, in these beautiful days of June, the world that 
opens to their eager, youthful gaze is a wilderness of 
roses that sway and murmur in the summer wind. 

What of the future? What will you do with 
your lives ? We, who are older, who have lived 
longer and traveled further, are usually ready enough 
with our counsel: but it is your ideal that must 
lead you now, and not the advice of others. Honor 
and truth we take for granted. " I would be vir- 
tuous," said an old philosopher, "though no one 
were to know it, just as I would be clean, though no 
one were to see me," The book of commonplace pre- 



76 % H^rcatf) of laurel* 

cept need not be opened here. Yet there is one word 
of counsel which now more than ever, — in a Pagan 
age of denial and democracy, — ought to be spoken 
to the youth of America. Be yourselves, and never 
abandon your noble aspirations ! You cannot live in 
absolute independence of the world. You must have 
affiliations with other persons: but it is not impera- 
tive that those affiliations should be numerous, and 
you have it within your power to make them select. 
You are under no obligation to imitate others or to 
do as others do. You ought never to permit your 
minds to be inundated with the ignorance, the crudity, 
and the vapid chatter of commonplace persons. Do 
not too much reverence the Past. Old burdens that 
have rolled from the shoulders of weary and dying 
men and women should not be taken up again by 
you. It is your life that you must live; it is not 
theirs; and now that they rest from their labors, 
let their works follow them. Neither must you sup- 
pose yourselves enjoined to assume the burdens that 
other persons have created, in the present day. Let 
those attend to grievances who have them, and do not 
allow your spirits to be dejected, your hopes darkened, 
and your lives encumbered with the vices, the errors, 
the follies, and the weakness of failures and of fools. It 
is, no doubt, pitiable and deplorable that failures and 
fools should exist and suffer; but they must not be 
permitted, merely because they exist and suffer, to 
drag you also into failure and folly. Respect the 
sanctity of your souls, and beware of superfluous con- 
tact with other lives. 



foutf) anb <^ppottunit^, 77 

For it is only the temporary and the expedient that 
are gregarious. In every great moment of life, in every 
time of insight or inspiration or crisis, the human be- 
ing is alone. The object of education, therefore, 
should be the development and building of an origi- 
nal, noble, adequate character, — not simply a prepara- 
tion for industrial pursuits, but an armament for ever- 
lasting life. The occupations of this world, however 
important, are transitory. The soul of man is immor- 
tal. Other views, I am aware, are entertained. Peo- 
ple who claim to be practical, but are only narrow, are 
never weary of declaring that education must be sensi- 
ble and not visionary. An effort to worry the public 
mind on that subject is a part of the errant activity 
of the complacent Man of Business, all the world over, 
and it has been so, at periodic intervals, for many 
years. I remember its pernicious existence long ago, 
— the jealous sneer at what was called "book-learn- 
ing," as opposed to what was called practical know- 
ledge of affairs ; meaning thereby cotton, iron, coal, 
the stock exchange and the revised statutes. Not 
long since (in 1890), in the newspapers of New York, 
that epidemic of commonplace burst forth with un- 
commxon virulence, and various individuals, in every 
case possessed of more wealth than wisdom, apprized 
us that scholastic training is superfluous, because it 
aims to furnish an equipment wholly in excess of what 
is requisite for business. My old friend William 
Warren, the comedian, used to tell, in his inimitable 
way, a story about a pompous, conventional trades- 
man, who was addressing the pupils of a Sunday- 



78 % JSrcatf) of %mtd. 

school. " I knew a little boy," he said,- " who always 
obeyed his mother, always washed his face in the 
morning, always came early to Sunday-school, and 
never stole an apple ! And where do you think that 
good boy is now ? " To this inquiry a small voice 
piped out an answer — " In Heaven, sir." " No, sir," 
cried the disgusted orator, " not in Heaven ! He 's in 
a store / " That is the mental drift of those enemies 
of the higher education. To their minds the chief 
end of man is to get himself employed in a store. 
They are what Joseph Jefferson called '' the selfish- 
made men of our time." They recall the remark of 
an old cynic, Henry Clapp, Jr., who said : " If you 
want to know what God Almighty thinks of money, 
look at the men to whom he gives the most of it." 
Perhaps, however, the sensitive perturbation mani- 
fested by those button-makers, those disciples of the 
grocery and the till, is a good sign. Certainly the 
fact is significant that the sensitive feeling is all on one 
side. Educated men are not worried. If education 
has not always given them wealth, it has given them 
blessings that no prodigality of wealth can buy ; and 
by this token they know that the province of educa- 
tion is not to train young people for business, but to 
embark them upon life, — of which business is only an 
incident. The best wisdom of the wisest of mankind 
has always taught that lesson. Make your business 
tributary to your mind, and not your mind subservient 
to your business. " The world is too much with us," 
cried Wordsworth. Do not defer to the world, said 
Matthew Arnold : 



§outj) anti <B^pnttvmtp. 79 



For they, believe me, who await 
No gifts from Chance have conquered Fate. 
They, winning room to see and hear. 
And to men's business not too near, 
Through clouds of individual strife 
Draw homeward to the general life. 

Judgment will differ as to the question of educa- 
tion, but there is one subject upon which we can all 
agree — and that is, our obligation to the young. For 
some persons within the sound of my voice the roses 
have already been gathered, the sunshine has begun 
to fade, the music is dying into silence. Life, for 
some of us who are gathered here, has taken its set- 
tled shape and hue, and it cannot signify much, and it 
will not signify long, which way the current flows or 
whither the clouds may drift. But the green leaves 
follow the sere, and the fragrance of nature and the 
rapture of life are still in the world. To our tired 
eyes the scene grows barren and gray; but to the 
eyes of the children it is bright and beautiful. 

Ah, shield the little hearts from wrong. 
While childhood's laugh is ringing ; 

And kiss the lips that sing the song. 
Before they cease their singing, i 

When the record is made up and we look back upon 
the past, it is not the memory of what we have done 

1 Lines from a poem by Miss Harriet McEwen Kimball, of Portsmouth, 
New Hampshire, whose devotional poetry is not less beautiful than sincere, 
and whose character and life are an honor to human nature and a blessing to 
all who know them. 



8o % IBireatfj of %antd. 

for ourselves that will comfort and strengthen us, but 
the memory of what we have done for others. 

The portal through which I entered into the service 
of the Staten Island Academy was that of calamity 
and bereavement. The Library that my wife and I 
have established here commemorates our beloved son 
Arthur, who perished, in a sudden and lamentable 
manner, in January, 1886. It is natural that parents 
should cherish their children as excellent beyond com- 
parison and precious beyond value. I think, however, 
that I utter the conviction of all who knew him when 
I declare that, in brilliancy of mind, gentleness of 
manner, sweetness of temperament, beauty of person, 
and the exquisite and indescribable charm of genius, 
Arthur Winter was extraordinary and unique. His 
life, in this world, lasted not quite fourteen years, and 
every moment of it was a blessing. For his mother 
and for me the world is changed and darkened since 
he went away, and it can never be the same that once 
it was. I must not, however, speak more than these 
few words about him now. 

His part in all the pomp that fills 
The circuit of the summer hills 
Is, that his grave is green. 

And yet, not altogether so ; for he was more than 
worthy of the monument that we have erected, and 
time will more and more testify, in the growth and the 
worth of this institution, as the years drift away, how 
rich is the legacy of beneficence that the community 
inherits from genius and goodness that are consecrated 



by sorrow and immortalized by love. The noble work 
that he might have done in the world, had his life 
been spared, can only now be conjectured ; but as long 
as this memorial endures the influence of his gentle spirit 
must still be active for the welfare of others, and 
therefore it will outlast the lives of all who mourn 
for him, and survive even the regrets of affection and 
the tears of grief. 

To live in hearts we leave behind 
Is not to die. 

In the making of the Library I have been guided by 
one thought. I wished to give to other children what, 
if he had lived, I should have given to him. The use 
of this collection of books is not limited exclusively to 
the academy. The public also, and especially the 
actors, may claim kindred here and have their claim 
allowed. The books are such as persons with bright 
minds can read. A resolute effort has been made to 
exclude dullness. In my childhood it was my mis- 
fortune to be restricted, for my reading, to the convivial 
companionship of such works as the " Night Thoughts " 
of Dr. Young, the melancholy numbers of Henry 
Kirke White, the versified preachments of the un- 
fortunate Cowper, — whose life was darkened and 
whose mind was well-nigh ruined by the blight of Cal- 
vinism, — and a remarkable compound of elegies by 
Gray and Mason, Yalden on Darkness, Dr. Porteus 
on Death, and Dr. Blair on The Grave. From the 
natural consequence of brooding over these refreshing 
14 



82 311 Wttat^ of %antd. 

compositions it was difficult to recover; and later, 
when they had been left behind, I had still to endure, 
for some time, the weight of " Paradise Lost " and 
the somnolent didacticism of " Rasselas, Prince of 
Abyssinia." Nobody told me of such authors as Cow- 
ley, Herrick, Shelley, Keats, Moore, Burns, Scott, and 
Byron, and it was only by chance that I was presently 
liberated into the celestial world of Shakespeare. In 
directing my efforts, therefore, and in guidingthose of the 
dear and honored friends among the actors and authors 
who have aided me in building up the Arthur Winter 
Memorial Library, I have striven to assemble such 
creations of literature as will inform, elevate, strengthen, 
and cheer; such books as will impart pleasure as well 
as wisdom, and happiness as well as virtue ; such books 
as will be read with delight and remembered with 
affection; such books as are a blessing and not a 
burden, 

I must trespass no further upon your patience. Other 
voices are to be heard — voices that I am sure you 
will rejoice to hear. One of them, Erastus Wiman, 
speaks to you with the authority of a man of affairs, 
glad and grateful, however, that he can turn away from 
the strife of the practical world, to bear his testimony 
here, as he has borne it elsewhere, to the imperative 
necessity of educational discipline, the importance of 
learning, and the dignity of the scholastic life. The 
other, George William Curtis, speaking to you from 
the noble eminence of laureled scholarship and beauti- 
ful art, weaves yet again the welcome spell of match- 
less eloquence, turning the memory of other tones to 



f out!) anti <Bppottnmt^. 83 



oblivion, and pointing with new emphasis the lovely 
thought of Milton: 

How charming is divine philosophy ! 

Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, 

But musical as is Apollo's lute, 

And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, 

Where no crude surfeit reigns. 



THE IDEAL IN EDUCATION 



Cl^e 91tieal in thutation. 

SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE THEATRE IN STAPLETON, 
STATEN ISLAND, JUNE 17, 1892. 

IN these proceedings the part that has been assigned 
to me is simple, and I venture to hope that my 
performance of it will meet with your approval, if for 
no other reason, because it will be brief. As President 
of the trustees of the Staten Island Academy I am to 
deliver the diplomas of the institution into the hands 
of the students who are graduated here to-day ; and, 
in behalf of their instructors and of my official asso- 
ciates, I am to wish, for these brave young spirits, — 
these adventurous mariners, just embarked upon the 
ocean of untried experience, — a prosperous voyage, a 
peaceful haven, and a safe deliverance out of all the 
perils and tribulations of human life. That wish is 
deeply felt and it is soon spoken. " JVz/ niortalibus 
ardui est." Speed onward and be happy! Shake- 
speare, who says everything for us so much better 
than we can say it ourselves, has given us a word for 
this hour, among the rest : 

Upon your sword * 

Sit laurel victory, and smooth success 
Be strewed before your feet ! 

With that aspiration I might consider my duty ful- 
filled. It has, indeed, been suggested that I should 

87 



88 % Wttat^ of %mctL 

proceed further and should address this audience 
upon such topics as the occasion naturally involves. 
The friendly makers of that suggestion, however, have 
but imperfectly considered, or have not considered at 
all, the formidable obstacle with which I am con- 
fronted. George William Curtis, who was to have 
spoken, is, unfortunately, kept away by illness, and, 
practically, I am requested to fill the place of the most 
accomplished orator in America. It is a task that far 
transcends my powers. I could not hope even to 
echo the music of that magical voice. The utmost 
that I could do would be to honor, — as, with all my 
heart, I do, — the exalted ideal of character, conduct, 
and scholarship of which he is the conspicuous and 
consummate image. His presence would have been 
a kindness and a benefit : his absence is a loss and a 
sorrow. Yet his absence unseals the lips of homage, 
and, at least, I may speak of his example. In no 
better way than when I point to our illustrious fellow- 
citizen could I denote the ideal of excellence toward 
which our desires and labors in this institution are 
directed — the excellence of absolute integrity; of in- 
flexible principle ; of profound and incessant devotion 
to duty ; of ample scholarship and a broad mind ; of 
that intrinsic virtue of character which imparts dignity 
and power to individual life, and that sensibility, re- 
finement, and gentleness which are its surpassing 
crown of grace. I know that I shall speak the un- 
equivocal sentiment, not of this assemblage only, but 
of the community, when I exclaim, in the beautiful 
words of the great Roman poet, 



€8e 3[ti0al in €bucattott 89 



Ibimus, ibimus, 
Utcunque praecedes, supremum 
Carpere iter, comites parati. 

When I had the privilege of speaking to you, last 
year, in this place, I urged the superlative importance 
of the higher education, I deplored the custom of its 
depreciation, peculiar to a class of business men who, 
without learning and without culture, have neverthe- 
less acquired wealth, and who therefore indulge the 
delusion that they are successful in life. My views 
upon that subject remain unchanged. Yet I would 
not be supposed to underrate the importance of ex- 
ecutive ability or of a suitable training for practical 
affairs. The natural tendency of mankind is toward 
self-indulgence, selfishness, and sloth. It is only by 
sleepless vigilance and resolute activity that a virtuous 
social progress is stimulated and maintained. Noth- 
ing is more important to society than the man of 
action who is controlled by wisdom and animated 
by a noble purpose. It has long been observed of 
the scholar that he is also the hermit. Men of fine 
spiritual strain and of high intellectual attainment are, 
usually, reclusive. They do not like close contact 
with affairs. They are contented to be spectators. 
They dwell apart — as Goethe did, and Niebuhr, and 
Emerson. They see the errors of the vagrant human 
race, and sometimes they indicate them. They con- 
sider their duty fulfilled when they have shown the 
true principle and the right path, and they do not 
wish to be any further troubled. They, generally, do 
not expect to see anything made right ; — and that is 

IS 



90 % Wttat^ of Hautri* 

natural ; because, for the most part, the world has al- 
ways passed them by unheeded. They are relegated 
to solitude and isolation, and they are content. Not 
until the weakness of age came upon him did that wise 
philosopher Emerson, for example, show the least im- 
patience because his ideas were not practically adopted 
and applied. He was satisfied with the diffusion of 
influence upon the thought of his time. All his days 
he could look onward, to the great Hereafter, when 
we shall see wisely and clearly, and be at peace. 

It may happen, however, that the scholar is also the 
man of action, and then indeed there is reason for pub- 
lic gratitude. If truth and beauty are assailed, he will 
defend them. If right is trampled down, he will raise 
it up. If ignorant, swarming numbers threaten, — as 
in Great Britain and in this Republic of ours they do 
threaten, — to overwhelm and destroy the safeguards 
of a rational civilization, he will oppose them, he 
will quell their tumult and enforce their obedience. 
Honor^ therefore, to the practical man ! Yet, since 
scholarship is a weapon not less than a grace, I see 
not any reason why he who possesses the potentiality 
of action should not also be regnant in the domain of 
thought. Let us augment the chances of social wel- 
fare by the widest possible diffusion of the equipments 
and blessings of learning and of art. The higher a 
man's spiritual and intellectual development, — the 
ampler his resources of knowledge and of trained abil- 
ity, the greater his mastery of the experience of the 
past, — the more trenchant and the more puissant and 
splendid must be his capacity for helping the progress 



€J)e Slbeal in €tiucation» 91 

of his fellow-men ! Practical esteem for practical re- 
sults is not a new idea. The modems, with all their 
boasting, do little except to rediscover and reaffirm 
the ideas of the ancients. Respect for executive force 
and labor did not originate with the class that now 
assumes to bear its banner. It was, and it ever has 
been, the feeling and the purpose of the scholar. I 
will mention one denotement of it. More than seven 
centuries ago, in the reign of King Stephen, and while 
his war with the Empress Maud was still raging, a 
synod of the clergy, who were the scholars of that 
time, was held in the ancient city of Winchester, — the 
king's brother, the astute and formidable Bishop 
Henry de Blois, presiding, — and in that august eccle- 
siastical assembly, representative of all that was best 
in the thought and culture of the age, it was formally 
decreed that the same privilege of sanctuary that ap- 
pertained to the Church should also appertain to the 
Plough : and thereupon, solemnly, with lighted torches 
in their hands, those monks pronounced the awful sen- 
tence of excommunication upon all persons who, from 
that day forward, should molest or injure any laborer 
in agriculture. Labor has often assailed learning, but 
learning has always been the protective friend of labor. 
Discrepancies of theory, however, are merely super- 
ficial. Nature is above art. Truth survives error. 
Things fall into their places without regard to opin- 
ion. A conspicuous recent assailant of the higher 
education, for instance, is Mr. Andrew Carnegie. 
Actions, it is said, speak louder than words : it might 
be added that they speak a different language. Mr. 



92 % Wtmfi of %amd. 

Carnegie has declared that he can dispense with the 
classics and with all that is implied in the university 
scheme of classical education. Yet I observe that 
Mr. Carnegie's highest personal ambition is to be 
recognized as an author. I observe that the weapon 
he uses against the higher education is a weapon 
drawn from its own armory — the weapon of literary 
style : an implement of thought that he might use 
with more than his present fluency if he had been 
trained in those classical studies which he decries, and 
of which, perhaps, he is not the most competent judge. 
I remember, also, that the objects of Mr. Carnegie's 
zealous admiration are those apostles of the intellect, 
Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer, — both of 
whom he entertained when they were in America. 
And, finally, I remember that when, with Mr. Carne- 
gie, the practical work had been done, — when the 
great fortune was accumulated, when the man of busi- 
ness and of wealth wished to insure an actual, perma- 
nent, unassailable, indestructible result, — he founded 
libraries ; he built a college ; he started what will one 
day be a grand picture-gallery ; and he established a 
superb Academy of Music in the metropolis of his 
adopted land. That exemplifies the law of mind, the 
organic, elemental law of spiritual life, operating inde- 
pendently of all crude theories and transient, ephemeral 
moods : 

For nature, crescent, does not grow alone 
In thews and bulk ; but, as this temple waxes, 
The inward service of the mind and soul 
Grows wide withal. 



€|je 3l^eal in €bucation. 93 

From the operation of that elemental law there is, 
ultimately, no escape ; but the predominance of spirit- 
ual truth may be facilitated by environment. There 
are times when a hard, cold, or mean environment 
becomes intolerable. In youth the right environment 
is imperative. Nothing so much conduces to the 
development of character in the right direction. 
Nothing tends so much toward the economy of force. 
Nothing so directly contributes to the building of a 
beautiful life. Youths who are rightly surrounded at 
the beginning are often saved from errors that it would 
cost a lifetime to repair. 

I have often been called a dreamer. I hope 
the word is true. The dream that comes to me 
when I muse upon the future of this institution is 
part a memory and part a vision. I remember an 
ancient city, sleeping in the sunshine, on the moun- 
tainous banks of the rapid Moselle. I see again, on 
its embowered crag, the colossal fragments and ivy- 
mantled walls of the most romantic if not the grandest 
ruin in Europe. In the far distance glimmers the 
sparkling Rhine. Around me towers a glorious coli- 
seum of the pine-clad hills. The wind of summer, 
fragrant with spice and balm, is blowing from the 
Black Forest, and once again I hear the heavenly 
music of those golden bells of Heidelberg which are 
the sweetest in the world. Standing in that venerable 
place, I stand at the cradle of learning, which also is 
its monumental shrine. I remember the pensive tran- 
quillity of Stratford-upon-Avon. I see again the gray 
tower of the ancient Guild Chapel, in which the youths 



94 % Wtml^ of Haurri. 

of King Edward's school annually assemble for their 
closing day ; and, as the organ sounds and the hymn 
of worship floats upward to heaven, I know they will 
gaze through the arched casements that Shakespeare 
saw, and will look toward the sacred spot, less than a 
hundred feet away, where the greatest of all poets 
drew his last breath and closed his eyes forever upon 
the world. I remember the monastic peace and the 
celestial majesty of the close of Canterbury, — the lofty 
elms, the brooding rooks, the ivy-mantled masonry of 
the middle ages blent with cosy dwellings of a gentler 
period and a softer taste, and that stupendous tower 
which rises like a pillar of silver into the sunshine of 
heaven, — and I see the boys of King IJenry's school, 
in cloister and chapter-house and sanctuary, surrounded 
with the most august and impressive objects and as- 
sociations of historic renown. And, thus remembering 
and beholding what temples of culture and beauty 
have been reared for the children and students of other 
lands, I dream of a time when, upon yonder hillside, 
overlooking your beautiful bay, will rise the gables 
and turrets of the stateliest building that ever yet, in 
all this region, wisdom and art have devoted to the 
sacred service of education — which is the service of 
freedom, of religion, of benevolence, of gentleness, 
and of steadfast and immutable belief in man's supreme 
and superb destiny of everlasting development and 
progress, through the countless ages of immortal hfe. 

And now, my young friends, — completing a cere- 
mony which has been too long delayed, — I place in 
your hands the diplomas of your academy. Your 



€|)e Sjbeal in oJbucation. 95 

days have been happy ; but many happier days are in 
store for you than any that ever you have known. Let 
these memorials be to you the souvenirs of youthful 
friendships and of precious ties. Let them constantly 
remind you of the time when your opening lives were 
dedicated to the service of truth and beauty. To that 
service be faithful forever. And as often as you look 
upon these tokens let them admonish you that educa- 
tion is never completed ; that as long as you live the 
opportunity of growth in knowledge, wisdom, and vir- 
tue will keep an equal pace with life. I part from you 
with the beautiful thought of Longfellow : 

Bear a lily in your hand ! 
Gates of brass cannot withstand 
One touch of that magic wand. 



THE TRUTH IN EULOGY 



i6 



Cl^e Crwt]^ in €uloq,v* 

SPEECH DELIVERED ON CURTIS MEMORIAL DAY, 

AT THE STATEN ISLAND ACADEMY, 

FEBRUARY 25, 1895. 

THE last word is to be spoken by me, and for that 
reason I venture to believe it will be welcome. 
Exacting duties have prevented me from carefully pre- 
paring an address for this day, and I shall ask your in- 
dulgence if I utter my thoughts precisely as they come 
into my mind. It is always, however, a dangerous ex- 
periment. I remember, in a talk with George William 
Curtis upon this subject, that he said to me : " I am 
always glad when it is somebody else who is to speak," 
and he told me that once, at a banquet, a prominent 
person said to him : " Do you prepare what you have to 
say at these dinners." Curtis replied that he did. 
" Well," said the other, " I do not." And then Curtis 
added, with that sweet smile of his which many of you 
so well remember, "When he came to address the 
meeting I found that he had told the truth." I dare 
say you will derive much the same impression from 
the careless speech that I shall utter now. 

A great observer of life, the poet Byron, wrote that ; 

Men are the sport of circumstances, when 
Those circumstances seem the sport of men. 

99 



loo % Wtcat^ of Eaurd* 

Circumstances of affliction and sorrow caused me to 
found, in this institution, a memorial library, led to my 
election in the board of trustees, and thus, indirectly, 
made me the chief officer of the corporation. Since ever 
I have believed anything I have believed that educa- 
tion is the corner-stone of society, but I never ex- 
pected to be personally associated with the cause of 
education. From the earliest moment when I became 
connected with this institution I have labored with all 
my heart and strength for its advancement. I have 
especially desired that there should be, in this acad- 
emy, a home influence, a home atmosphere, an atmo- 
sphere of kindness, gentleness, refinement, and beauty. 
I have desired that teachers should be liberal and 
noble in their methods of tuition, and mild and rea- 
sonable in their methods of discipline, and I have de- 
sired that pupils should be docile, obedient, mindful 
of their opportunities, and studious to improve them — 
for the privilege and the glory of youth come but 
once, and not till they are gone do we know how pre- 
cious they were. That has been, and is, my ideal. 
We all have ideals, and howsoever they may be marred 
or defeated by the hard experience of life, I think we 
shall be wise to hold fast by them, and cherish them. 

One reason why I have wished that the life and the 
character of our honoured and lamented friend Curtis 
— his beautiful character, his beneficent life — should 
be urged upon your attention, as often as the anni- 
versary of his birth recurs, is the fact that he pos- 
sessed, in an eminent degree, those great virtues, es- 
pecially necessary in studious life, and precious in all 



€j)e €mij[j in ^ulogp* loi 

life — forbearance and patience. I have a little dreaded, 
however, lest much insistence upon the example of 
Curtis might cause our eulogy of him to seem monoto- 
nous and tiresome. Nothing is more easy than to 
make the name of a good man tedious in the ears of 
eager youth. When George Peabody died, in Eng- 
land, many days elapsed before his body was brought 
home and his obsequies were completed : whereupon 
there was a reference to the subject, in a western news- 
paper, — a reference intended to be sympathetic, — 
and the editor said : " Such a long time has passed 
between the death of Peabody and his burial, and the 
newspapers have been so full of the subject, and so 
much has been said about him, that we could almost 
wish he had not died." There is always the danger 
that people in general, and especially young people, — 
who live in hope and not in memory, — may grow 
weary of hearing Aristides called the Just. 

History and biography are prone to extreme views. 
If a man is to be denounced as bad, he is made so bad 
that we feel he never could have existed, — at least in 
the temperature with which we are acquainted. Look, 
for instance, upon the character of Richard III. The 
genius of Shakespeare has laid upon that character 
a blight which it is impossible to remove ; yet nothing 
is more certain than that two-thirds of the stories 
told about Richard III are untrue. The story, for 
example, that he murdered his wife, is ridiculous. 
Their marriage was a love-match, and no two people 
ever lived more happily together than Richard and 
his Anne. The story that he murdered Henry VI, in 



I02 % Wttatt^ of %amd. 

the Tower, has been exploded by the clearest evidence. 
Consider that much-married man, Henry VIII. When 
I first read about him and his wives I was amazed at 
the number of his marriages, and at the surprising 
elasticity of spirit with which, in spite of such deplor- 
able ill-luck, he succeeded in keeping alive the flame 
of hope in his royal breast. And so, I was quite pre- 
pared, when the truth came, as it did at last, when Mr. 
Froude published the evidence, to learn that those 
marriages were political, and that it was a political 
policy that sacrificed King Henry VIII upon the 
altar of matrimony. 

As with the bad men, so with the good. We have 
all been reared in the belief that if there ever was an 
angel out of heaven it was William III, who accom- 
plished the revolution of 1688, in England. An angel 
he may have been, but he was one of the most colos- 
sal schemers of whom history preserves the record, 
and he possessed the additional accomplishment that 
he could call Heaven to witness his duplicity, and 
did not hesitate to do so. When his plot against his 
father-in-law was on the point of completion, his mes- 
sage to his most intimate friend said, simply : " I have 
not the least intention to make an attempt on the 
crown, and I pray God, who is powerful over all, to 
bless this, my sincere intention." 

Think of the injustice that has been done to the 
stately and splendid character of Washington. You will 
find in the library Mr, Weems' " Life of Washington," 
and you will find in that book, — there printed for the 
first time, — the story of the cherry tree and the hatchet, 



€l[je €tut{j in €ulo0p» 103 

a pure invention, a yarn that its maker took care not 
to publish until the immediate relatives of Washington 
had passed away. I do not know any exalted char- 
acter that has been subjected to more ill-usage. Were 
it not the character of one of the greatest of men, it 
would have been seriously impaired in the esteem of 
posterity, by the " goodies " who have so smirched it 
with their fatuous insipidity. When I >vas a youth, I 
saw a large picture in a shop window in Broadway, rep- 
resenting the Republican Court. In the centre stood 
the Father of his Country, and beside him stood his 
mother. One of that lady's hands was laid upon his 
shoulder, while the other pointed to an eight-day 
clock, which had recorded the hour of nine. Beneath 
the picture was an inscription, consisting of words 
which she was supposed to be saying, in the presence 
of the Republican courtiers : " Come, George, it is 
time to retire ! Late hours are injurious ! " To hang 
such a fringe of Sunday-school ornament upon the im- 
perial character of Washington is little less than a 
sacrilege. 

Curtis was a reticent man, and some people thought 
him a cold man. He was not effusive, but it would 
be a grave injustice to consider him a formalist or a 
" goody." One of the pioneers who went to the Cali- 
fornia gold fields in '49, records that one day he 
had placed a cloth across the window of his hut, so 
that he might change his apparel and shave, when he 
was astonished to see the cloth suddenly pulled down 
and to hear a voice which loudly inquired : " What is 
going on here so private ? " That is a ten- 



I04 % Wttat^ of flaurri* 

dency in American life. There must be no individual 
privacy. He who is not gregarious is supposed to be 
aping the airs of aristocracy. Curtis not only dwelt 
apart, but his life was ruled by the sternest moral prin- 
ciple. Whatever might happen, he stood for the right, 
and he felt, with his friend Lowell, that 

They are slaves who dare not be 
In the right, with two or three. 

I should like to linger upon the career of Curtis as a 
writer and speaker, but I have said much upon that 
theme elsewhere, and you have heard much upon it 
from others. Curtis had a high standard of rectitude, 
and by that standard he regulated his conduct and 
tested the conduct of others. But he was never a bore, 
either moral or intellectual. He did not pose as a 
model. He neither prattled precepts nor distributed 
tracts. He was fastidious, and, in an eminent degree, 
self-contained, and, as he lived under the strain of 
continual intellectual labor, he was, to some extent, 
isolated; but no man looked with more charity upon 
the faults and frailties of humanity; no man more 
deeply sympathized with the joys and sorrows of 
common life ; and no man more earnestly desired, or 
more faithfully labored to promote, the happiness of 
his fellow-men. As I think of him, I repeat the words 
of his friend Longfellow, by whom he was dearly 
loved : 

O, though oft depressed and lonely, 
All my fears are laid aside, 

If I but remember only, 
Such as these have lived and died. 



THE IDEAL IN LIFE 



17 



Cl&e 3!tieal in Uit. 



SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE THEATRE IN STAPLETON, 
STATEN ISLAND, JUNE l8, 1895. 

AS often as this anniversary comes around it brings 
Xjl a sense of relief and peace. The work of the aca- 
demic year is finished. The long ordeal of anxiety 
and endeavor is past. The goal has been reached 
and the toilers may rest. Like pilgrims ascending a 
mountain-side, who pause, at noonday, in a grateful 
shade, and, with equal serenity and pleased indiffer- 
ence, gaze downward upon the smiling valley far be- 
low, and upward to the cloud-swept summits far 
above, we feel that a portion of our toilsome journey 
is happily completed, and that now, for a little while, 
we can be idle. 

The sun is in the heavens, and the proud day, 
Attended with the pleasures of the world, 

and nothing remains but to listen to the ripple of the 
brook, the rustle of the branches, and the gentle 
whisper of the summer wind. 

It will be well for us, however, not to forget that 
equally in the hour of repose and in the hour of action 
the development of individual character must proceed, 
107 



io8 % Wtmt^ of %mcd. 

and that, under all circumstances, the inexorable ob- 
ligation of duty remains unchanged. Spiritual, moral, 
and intellectual advancement is the law of human 
life. The mind that does not aspire and advance 
will deteriorate and recede. At a moment like this, 
therefore^ the chief consideration which presents itself 
to every thoughtful observer is that of the solemn re- 
sponsibility, and, at the same time, the splendid privi- 
lege of youth. It is an old and hackneyed theme, and 
yet for each successive generation it is vital, para- 
mount, and absorbing, — and therefore, if its impor- 
tance be considered, it is forever new. Thousands of 
eager spirits have asked the question, in times that 
are past, and thousands will ask it in times that are to 
come, — What is rightfully expected at our hands, and 
what shall we do with our lives ? 

The youths who are graduated here to-day are so 
much nearer than they were to an active participation 
in the cares and labors of the world. Other youths 
will follow them, year after year, passing through the 
same portal of joyous expectation and entering upon 
the same dubious and dangerous highway of action, 
emulation, and strife. Many trials await those ad- 
venturous spirits, but also, as we gladly trust, much 
happiness awaits them ; and to that fortune they are 
committed, with all our blessings and with all our 
prayers ! No man can foresee the future ; and so the 
best counsel that experience dictates can only speak 
the old heroic watchwords, — Courage, Hope, and 
Cheer! It is all crystallized in the golden lines of 
Shakespeare : 



€f^t 3!beal m %iSt. 109 



Look what thy soul holds dear ! Imagine it 

To lie that way thou go'st, not whence thou com'st : 

Suppose the singing-birds musicians, 

The grass whereon thou tread'st the Presence, strew'd. 

The flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more 

Than a delightful measure, or a dance. 

There has not been a time, within my knowledge, 
when that auspicious admonition was more needed 
than it is in these hard, ghttering, boisterous days, by 
those who are entering upon the active pursuits of life. 
The age upon which they are cast is one of painful 
transition, of agnosticism, of the aggressive, self-asser- 
tive encroachment of numbers, and of seething popu- 
lar tumult. In almost every direction, conflict and 
noise! In almost every quarter, luxury, profanity, 
vulgarity, and pretentious mediocrity ! The cities are 
resonant with hideous clangor, and overrun with loco- 
motive agencies of electrical massacre ! The country 
is populous with political quacks and crazy socialists! 
Leaders of thought, however, have hailed this time 
as one of splendid achievement, — and this hour is not 
one for controversy, or even for dissent. The music 
of your festival should not be marred by a single dis- 
cordant note. I will only venture to remind you 
that, after more than seventy years of continuous and 
amazing scientific development, the dominant influ- 
ences of the age are more material than spiritual; 
and, without disparaging science, I should wish to 
urge that materialism, — promoting selfishness and 
closing the portal of hope, — is a fruitful cause of evil, 
and to declare that nothing is so essential to the young 



no % Wttatf^ of %mtd. 

as fidelity to the spiritual principle and inflexible de- 
votion to the ideal. Whatever be the characteristics 
of the age, its votaries must confront the hour. I 
know not how they could be better armed than with 
the sacred purpose to preserve, to the end of their 
days, the romance and the beauty of their youth, — 
with all its sweet illusions and all its glorious beliefs, 
— and to keep themselves unspotted from the world. 
There are, indeed, moments when the philosophy 
of the ideal seems visionary; when the disheartening 
force of the commonplace seems to overwhelm every- 
thing with platitude and dullness; when "the seamy 
side " of life comes uppermost, with an effect that is 
almost comic. I was speaking to an old friend of 
mine, in England, — the Duke of Beaufort, — and with 
enthusiastic interest, about that famous ruin, Tintem 
Abbey. " Make a visit to me at Troy House," the 
Duke said : " Come when there is the harvest moon, 
for then the place is at its best; and we will go there 
together, and see the ghost." And then he added: 
" Tintern is a part of my property, and it lately cost 
me a thousand pounds to dig the rubbish out of it." 
To us that venerable ruin is associated with historic 
and romantic traditions and with the sublime poetry of 
Wordsworth. To the owner it is, at times, an object 
of mere pecuniary solicitude. So goes the world. 
There is a commonplace side to everything ; but there 
is also an ideal side — and it is only by fixing our 
eyes upon the ideal that we are able to forget the 
toils and cares of a laborious existence and to bear 
with patience the ills of mortality. 



It is not devotion to a fantasy that I would advo- 
cate : it is devotion to the intellect ; to learning ; to 
purity, nobility, simpHcity, beauty; to the life of the 
spirit, which no worldly mishap can ever defeat ! Ex- 
amples of that devotion might readily be drawn from 
the history of literature. Such a book as William 
Gifford's Autobiography, — usually prefixed to his 
translation of Juvenal, — is worth more to the young 
than pages of precept. But I must not linger upon 
examples. Amid the vicissitudes of experience, de- 
votion to the ideal is the only sure refuge. At the 
outset of life it is natural that the future should be 
viewed with anxiety ; but this anxiety is often mis- 
placed and useless. Every youth must find a voca- 
tion, but the building of character is more important 
than the choice of employment. When I review the 
past, and recall the companions of my youth, and 
consider the victors and the vanquished, — who has 
been exalted and who has fallen by the way, — I am 
almost persuaded that the control of circumstances is 
well-nigh impossible. Most persons who have ar- 
rived at the autumn of life have rested upon that con- 
clusion. That chord of memory was deftly touched 
by Thackeray, in his quaint " Ballad of Bouillabaisse " : 

There's Jack has made a wond'rous marriage ; 

There's laughing Tom is laughing yet; 
There's brave Augustus drives his carriage ; 

There's poor old Fred in the Gazette ; 
On James's head the grass is growing — 

Good Lord ! the world has wagged apace, 
Since here we set the claret flowing, 

And drank, and ate the Bouillabaisse. 



112 ^ Wttai^ of %mttl 

But, however the world may wag, the fine spirit 
never falters. Whatever may be the burdens laid 
upon it, the fine spirit rises to the ordeal, and meets 
them, and bears them. Whatever the sorrows that 
darken the world of man, the fine spirit looks through 
the darkness, and sees beyond it the eternal sunshine 
of the world of God. Hold fast, therefore, by the 
spirit that is within you ! Cherish your aspirations ! 
Trust in the dreams of your youth! The ships that 
sailed at morning will all come home before the dark. 
Life will have trials, and much that time may give 
will, in time, be taken away ; but the hour will never 
come that can take from you the proud supremacy of 
your intellect, the rich treasures of your learning, the 
integrity of your character, the purity of your honor ! 
That is true success! 

Who misses or who wins the prize ? 
Go, lose or conquer as you can ; 
But if you fall or if you rise, 

Be each, pray God, a gentleman ! 

Four years ago a voice that we all loved was heard 
in this place, speaking to cheer our young adventurers 
upon their morning march. We did not then know 
that we were hearing the honored Curtis for the last 
time — that this, for us, was indeed "the setting sun 
and music at the close." If we could have known it, 
how sacred every word would have seemed to be! 
how precious the counsel! how solemn the hour! I 
know not if it will ever be my privilege to address this 
academy again. To you, the graduates, let me ex- 



€|)c Sl^eal in %ik. 113 



press my earnest wish that the lesson of my parting 
words may sink deep into your hearts, and always 
abide there. You have labored long and well, and 
you are graduated here with the approbation of your 
teachers and with the sympathy and delighted favor of 
your friends. Take from my hands these diplomas 
that you have merited so well; and take from my 
lips the heartfelt wish that your lives will be successful 
and happy ! Parting is always sad, — but the sad- 
ness of this parting will soon be forgotten. Not so, 
I profoundly hope and believe, the purpose with which 
you now set forward, to fulfil, by steadfast, unswerv- 
ing, passionate fidelity to noble ends, the golden 
promise of your beautiful youth. I cannot better 
conclude this address than with the wise admonition 
of Longfellow, commending the example of the builders 
of old : 

Let us do our work as well, — 

Both the unseen and the seen ; 
Make the house where gods may dwell 

Beautiful, entire, and clean ! 



IN MEMORY OF 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 



9|n i^emori? of 
(tE»eorge 2IKlliam €uxti^* 

SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE SEMINARY BUILDING, NEW 
BRIGHTON, STATEN ISLAND, FEBRUARY 24, 1 896. 

THE trustees of the Staten Island Academy have 
authorized the present celebration of the birthday 
of Curtis, and, speaking as their president and repre- 
sentative, I have now to declare their deep sympathy 
with the motive, spirit, and purpose of this occasion. 
" The reason of things," said the old English divine 
Dr. South, " lies in a little compass, if the mind could, 
at any time, be so happy as to light upon it." Curtis 
was one of our friends and benefactors, but it is not 
for that reason that we select his birthday for especial 
observance. The academy is grateful to all its friends 
and benefactors, whether living or passed away, but it 
does not, and cannot, commemorate them. Curtis was 
more than a friend and benefactor; he was a great 
and unusual character, and, dwelling for many years 
in this community, and coming into more or less inti- 
mate contact with many of our lives, he left to us a 
great and unusual example; and, since our cause is 
education, which aims ever at harmonious develop- 
ment of character and wise conduct of life, it is 
117 



ii8 m Wttal^ of %amd. 



appropriate that we should, from time to time, 
recall the image and dwell upon the memory of 
one whose nobleness was once a living delight, and 
whose spotless fame is now a hallowed monitor and 
guide. 

The records of biography, ample and widely diversi- 
fied, present but few men who, living, as Curtis did, for 
nearly three score years and ten, developed themselves 
in a manner so perfectly symmetrical, and exerted 
upon society an influence at once so strong, so gentle, 
and so pure. His vocations were journalism, litera- 
ture, politics, and oratory, and in all of them he was 
beneficent, because in all of them the exercise of his 
splendid abilities was inexorably and invariably gov- 
erned and directed by a clear and fine sense of duty. 
It would be superfluous here to specify his talents or 
enumerate his achievements. The word for this hour 
and this place is simply a reminder of the beauty of 
his life. He lived for others, and the loveliest attributes 
of his nature were his sweet and cheerful patience and 
his exquisite refinement. His mind was invincibly 
anchored upon what he has himself defined as " that 
celestial law which subordinates the brute force of 
numbers to intellectual and moral ascendency," and to 
the last, and in the face of every adverse occurrence, 
he believed in the ultimate triumph of virtue and 
beauty in the ordination of human affairs. The pres- 
ence of such a man is, at all times, a blessing; the 
memory of such a man, in the present time of insen- 
sate luxury, vacuous vulgarity, and the insolent tyranny 
of ignorant numbers, is an inexpressible comfort. As 



<0corge H^iftiam Curtis* 119 

I think of his example, I remember the noble words 
of Longfellow: 

The star of the unconquered will, 

He rises in my breast. 
Serene, and resolute, and still. 

And calm, and self-possessed. 

For the abuses of this period, I am wishful to believe, 
as he believed, will pass away. Our hope is in the 
cause of education, which he represented, and for 
which we labor. As that cause advances, the people will 
learn that they are not wise, virtuous, and noble simply 
because they happen to be born, but that much self- 
discipline is essential to make them adequate to the 
duties of citizenship and worthy of its rights. As that 
cause advances, the discordant elements of our hybrid 
population will become subdued and harmonized, and 
we shall hear no more of "the Irish vote," or "the 
German vote "; of murders on election day; of thieves 
and assassins elected or appointed to public office ; of 
Indians robbed and slaughtered ; or of negroes hanged 
upon trees and tortured with fire. As that cause 
advances, the press will cease to be, — what, for the 
most part, it has become, — an odious chronicle of 
small beer and a hideous, primer-like picture-book for 
hare-brained fools; while the theatre, which plays so 
large a part in contemporary social life, will present 
spectacles that ennoble and cheer, instead of scenes 
that sadden and disgust. As that cause advances, our 
highways may be relieved of the baleful engines of 
racket, destruction, and sudden death with which they 



I20 % Wtmf^ of %mt^. 

are now furnished, and something Hke a nornnal con- 
dition of the pubHc ears and nerves may be restored. 
As that cause advances, profane and filthy language 
will be no longer heard in our streets and our pub- 
lic vehicles, as it is now, and the great American 
pastimes of spitting, swearing, and bragging will 
happily be discarded. As that cause advances, the 
right of voting will be properly restricted and the 
intelligence, and not the ignorance and folly, of the 
nation will prevail in its government; the cackle of 
silly laughter at all serious things will cease to be heard ; 
and the love and reverence that bind the human heart 
to the fireside of home and to the altar of God will 
blossom in a civilization of honorable industry, gentle 
manners, dignity, and peace. 

Swift fly the years and rise th' auspicious morn ! 

Bayard Taylor, in 1869, said these words: 

We have relaxed the rough work of two and a half centuries, 
and are beginning to enjoy that rest and leisure out of which the 
grace and beauty of civilization grow. The pillars of our 
political fabric have been slowly and massively raised, like the 
drums of Doric columns, but they still need the crowning capi- 
tals and the sculptured entablature. Law and right and physical 
development build well, but they are cold, mathematical archi- 
tects ; only the poet and the artist make beautiful the temple. 
Our natural tendency, as a people, is to worship positive material 
achievement, in whatever form displayed ; even the poet must 
be a partisan before the government will recognize his existence. 
So much of our intellectual energy has been led into the new 
paths which our national growth has opened, — so exacting are 
the demands upon working brains, — that taste and refinement of 



•George IBiHiam Curtijef* 



121 



mind and warm appreciation of the creative spirit of beauty are 
only beginning to bloom, here and there, among us, like tender 
exotic flowers. " The light that never was on sea or land " shines 
all around us, but few are the eyes whose vision it clarifies. Yet 
the faculty is here, and the earnest need. The delight in art, of 
which poetry is the highest manifestation, has ceased to be the 
privilege of a fortunate few, and will soon become, let us hope, 
the common heritage of the people. 

More than a quarter of a century has passed since 
those words were uttered, and as we look upon our 
" Doric columns," emblazoned with the great names of 
the several bosses, together with the various and 
illustrious Mikes and Barneys by whom our govern- 
ment is infested, our legislation bartered, and our 
politics disgraced, we are able to reflect that we still 
possess the blessed privilege of hope. 

In the commemorative oration on Curtis that I 
delivered at the Castleton, on February 24, 1893, 
I said these words upon literature: 

" The mission of the man of letters is to touch the 
heart; to kindle the imagination; to ennoble the 
mind. He is the interpreter between the spirit of 
beauty that is in Nature and the general intelligence 
and sensibility of mankind. He sets to music the 
pageantry and the pathos of human life, and he keeps 
alive in the soul the holy enthusiasm of devotion to the 
ideal. He honors and perpetuates heroic conduct, and 
he teaches by many devices of art — by story and 
poem, and parable, and essay, and drama — purity of 
life, integrity to man, and faith in God. He is con- 
tinually reminding you of the goodness and loveliness 
to which you may attain ; continually causing you to 

19 



122 % Wtm^ of Eaurd* 

see what opportunities of nobility your life affords; 
continually delighting you with high thoughts and 
beautiful pictures. He does not preach to you. He 
does not attempt to regulate your specific actions. 
He does not assail you with the hysterical scream of 
the reformer. He does not carp and vex and meddle. 
He whispers to you, in your silent hours, of love and 
heroism, and holiness, and immortality, and you are 
refreshed and strong, and come forth into the world 
smiling at fortune and bearing blessings in your hands." 
Curtis was, first of all and most of all, a man of 
letters ; yet in whatever aspect you please to contem- 
plate his life you find him always the image of integ- 
rity, simplicity, and taste. He was a representative 
American gentleman, and no man of his time more 
completely embodied the essential virtues of the 
American character. The heroes of English history 
whom he had selected as his models, and whose 
example he kept constantly in view, were Sir Philip 
Sidney, John Milton, and John Hampden. The 
American whom he most revered was Washington, 
and there was in his nature a strong infusion of the 
reticence, the continence, the coldness, the calm 
endurance, and iron resolution, — in a word, the 
inherent, stately aristocracy, — for which Washington 
was remarkable. He believed in " the rights of man," 
in the liberty which is not license, in equality before 
the law ; but he did not believe that " the rights of 
man" are obtained by gregarious wallowing in the 
mire of vulgarity. He would have equalized society, 
not by degrading the lofty, but by raising the low. As 



(jBeorgc IBiiHiam Curtis* 123 

a patriot he neither bragged nor " hollered." He knew 
that the Republic is based upon great principles, which 
the passage of " Resolutions " can neither hinder nor 
help. He was not provincial, and, had he been living 
now, he would have been one of the foremost to 
repudiate and denounce the hysterics with which the 
peace of our country has of late ^ been endangered, its 
intelligence humiliated, and its prosperity marred. In 
politics he esteemed fidelity to principle as more 
essential than allegiance to party, and his single aim 
was to do right, without regard to the consequence. 
As a journalist he respected the sanctity of private 
life, he did not publish slop and call it " news," he 
discussed ideas and policies, and he strove to mould 
and guide the public opinion, not as a follower, but as 
a leader. As an orator he preserved and illustrated 
the high and splendid traditions of Burke, Everett, 
Sumner, and Phillips. His eloquence was dedicated 
to the service of truth and beauty, to the commemora- 
tion of great deeds, and to the glory of splendid 
names. In literature he had the purity of Addison 
and the gentleness of Goldsmith, together with a moral 
fervor, a cheerful sweetness, and a pensive grace that 
were his own. 

The American authors in association with whose 
names I treasure that of Curtis are the elder Dana, 
Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck and Donald 
G. Mitchell; not because he resembled them, in all 
their attributes, but because, like them, he diffused 
refinement and cheer from a region of meditative 

1 The allusion is to the Venezuela folly. 



124 ^ Wttat^ of StauteL 

seclusion. Washington Irving I never saw, but the 
elder Dana I saw and heard, in my youth, and I 
remember a glimpse of Halleck. The most interesting 
of American authors now alive is Mitchell, and he is 
so because, among other reasons, while profoundly 
devoted to his art, he is not feverishly solicitous as to 
the admiration of the world. 

The commemoration of such men as Curtis is among 
the good auguries of our turbulent time, for it means 
that probity, personal distinction, learning, art, and the 
graces of life are not wholly unrecognized or un- 
valued. Thirty years ago not a single monument had 
been erected in the United States to an American 
poet. The first monument of that kind ever set up 
in this country was the obelisk commemorative of 
Halleck, at Guilford, Connecticut, where he was born 
and where his ashes rest.i Curtis was not distinctively 
a poet, although he possessed elements of the poetic 
temperament, but he was a representative man of 
letters, and his beautiful pages have enriched our 
literature and our lives. The Staten Island Academy 
purposes to erect his monument. It will be the 
Curtis Lyceum, and within it will be placed his portrait 
and his bust, together with the relics of him that we 
are able to assemble; and within it, as the years drift 
away, by speech, by song, by festival, by every form of 
artistic effort and by every manifestation of innocent 
joy, all that is finest in the mind and brightest in the 
beauty of our island will unite to honor him, as he 

1 The Halleck Monument, at Guilford, Connecticut, was dedicated on 
July 8, 1869. 



ciBieorge tl^iHiam €urttj?» 125 

would have wished to be honored, by association with 
their happiness, and thus to keep his memory forever 
green. 

Let me close this address with the gentle aspiration 
of the poet Whittier : 

Our lips of praise must soon be dumb, 

Our gratefal eyes be dim ; 
O, brothers of the days to come, 

Take tender charge of him ! 



Note. — In the course of this address the speaker told humorous anecdotes, 
and he counselled the students to read only those authors whose writings 
awaken in their minds a spontaneous, alluring sjrmpathy, and not to expend 
their time in merely conventional reading. He also repeated, as appropriate 
to Curtis, the touching lines on Joseph Rodman Drake, written many years 
ago by Halleck, beginning : 

" Green be the turf above thee. 
Friend of my better days ! 
None knew thee but to love thee. 
None named thee but to praise." 



THE STATEN ISLAND ACADEMY 

1 A WORD OF WELCOME 

2 THE INTELLECTUAL PRINCIPLE 

3 A WORD OF FAREWELL 



a moth of melcome* 

SPEECH AT THE OPENING OF THE NEW BUILDING 

OF THE STATEN ISLAND ACADEMY, AT ST. 

GEORGE^ NEW BRIGHTON, S. I., JUNE 

15, 1896. 

A PLEASANT duty, — one of the most pleasant 
duties that have ever engaged my attention, — 
devolves upon me now. To you, the teachers and 
pupils of the Staten Island Academy, now for the first 
time formally assembled in its new building, I wish to 
speak a welcome, warm as kindness can make it, to 
this beautiful and permanent home. You will not 
expect me to say many words. The occasion, indeed, 
is one that scarcely calls for speech, because " things 
seen are mightier than things heard," and because to- 
day the evidence of our work is seen. 

This massive fabric, with its pleasing outlines, its 
graceful gables, and its romantic aspect, rising, under 
verdant trees, upon the golden shore of your beautiful 
Island, tells its own glad story of a noble purpose splen- 
didly fulfilled. This eager assemblage, also, is elo- 
quent of the consummation of a high endeavor. The 
long and weary years of anxious toil and waiting are 
ended. The courage that nothing could daunt and 
the patience that nothing could tire are rewarded 
now. I welcome you to light and beauty and plea- 
sure; to a habitation of comfort; to spacious halls 
20 129 



I30 % f^rreatfj of %mtd. 

and studios, wherein art and luxury will deftly min- 
ister to the needs of use ; to a library that will make 
you intimate with the best of all society, the immortal 
minds of every language and of every land. In one 
word, I welcome you to an ideal scholar's home. 

The reader of that precious biography, Boswell's 
Life of Johnson, is usually amused by the philoso- 
pher's description of the vendible brewery of his friend 
Thrale. " It is not," said Dr. Johnson, " merely a 
collection of vats and boilers, it is the potentiality of 
growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice." In a 
somewhat kindred vein, let me declare of this acad- 
emy — it is not merely a collection of chalk and 
blackboards, of slates and pencils, of the hard and 
barren paraphernalia of tuition ; it is a temple of cul- 
ture : and by culture I mean the possibility of a hap- 
piness that no vicissitude can alienate, the possibility 
of a success that no adversity can mar. In this 
scholastic haven you will, we hope, be happy, — find- 
ing the pathways of knowledge pleasant, and laying, 
firm and broad and deep, the foundations of an 
honorable, useful, lovely life. Opportunity is an 
angel that never comes but once. That angel has ar- 
rived for you ; and her face is radiant with promise 
and her hands are filled with blessings. Whether 
that promise will be fulfilled, and whether those bless- 
ings will be enjoyed, it is, in a great measure, for you 
to determine. Your future will depend upon your use 
of the present. 

Every human creature, I am aware, acts according 
to the trend of character — for that is fate; but even 



€6e ^mm 3[^toti lllcatiemp* 131 

fate can be modified by the action of the will; and 
you, who are upon the threshold of life, have now the 
golden opportunity, if you so resolve, to profit by the 
lovely environment that others have provided for you, 
and also by the monition of their experience. That 
monition would be, to make no error at the beginning. 
No human being ever entirely recovers from the con- 
sequences of a mistake at the start. Heed the warn- 
ing of those who have preceded you. The highway 
of human life, which to you seems strange and new, 
is a beaten track to them. Strengthen yourselves for 
your long journey, by the acquisition of knowledge, 
by cultivating the habit of independent thought, and 
by a devout allegiance to high standards of character, 
duty, and conduct. Aim always at the highest. It is 
recorded of the great Admiral, Lord Nelson, that when 
he was first made a captain, he used to encourage the 
midshipmen on his quarter-deck, by saying to them, 
" I am going a race to the mast-head ; I hope to have 
the pleasure of meeting you there." We are all mak- 
ing for the mast-head. May it be your privilege to 
nail your purple banners of victory to the peak, where 
they shall float and flash, in the golden glory of the 
sun, through all the tranquil hours of your long and 
happy day! 



Cl^e gintellectual l^rinciple* 

SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE STATEN ISLAND 
ACADEMY, JUNE l6, 1896. 

JUNE has come back, and with it the abundant 
grass, the glistening foliage, and the roses triumph- 
ant in the sun. It is the season of bloom and beauty, 
and all nature is exultant and superb. It is the season 
of rejoicing, and rightly and naturally it brings to us 
our festival of scholarship and our annual time of rest. 
Once more we cast aside our burdens. Once more 
we look to the ocean and to the stars. 

The clouds sail and the waters flow 
Whichever way they care to go, 
And all the sounds of action seem 
Like distant music in a dream. 

Shades of regret mingle, indeed, with all occasions 
like this, for the reason that these festivals of parting 
indicate the flight of time and the incessant and inex- 
orable operations of change. For some of us — per- 
haps for all of us — after to-day, nothing will be as 
once it was. In this assemblage, however, the feel- 
ing of the hour is chiefly one of gladness. The dedi- 
cation of this noble building marks an auspicious 
triumph for the cause of education, and thus for the 
welfare of the community, and in that we may well be 
glad. 

133 



134 ^ Wteatf^ of %mctl 

When I speak of education, I do not mean merely 
the impartment of knowledge, but the development of 
the character and the building of the mind. The in- 
fluence that leads to that result is always a public ben- 
efit. Civilization succeeds when it produces commu- 
nities that are governed by justice, dignified by intelli- 
gence, and adorned by refinement. In parts of the 
republic it has amply and brilliantly succeeded; in 
others it has failed ; and it has failed for want of true 
education — the education that exalts the soul above 
material things, and that cultivates, not the senses, but 
the intellect. 

I must not linger upon the shadows of the national 
picture, but neither must I disguise from myself that 
some of the signs of these times are ominous and sad. 
The church seems divided against herself. The po- 
litical situation is fraught with danger. The populace 
of labor views with discontent the spectacle of wealth 
concentrated in the hands of a few persons, and would 
gladly disperse it. The newspapers, with here and 
there an exception, by their reckless appeal to the low 
tastes and passions of the multitude, have widely cor- 
rupted the public morals and much debased the stan- 
dard of public intelligence. Developments are every- 
where in progress, — notably in the application of 
electricity to common life, — which, unless more wisely 
regulated, must inevitably, and within a few years, 
make us a nation of nervous invalids. 

While, however, I believe that ignorance and folly 
were never more widely diffused than they are now, 
and that levity and coarseness were never more ram- 



€j)e M>t&,tm Sl^Ianti ^catiemp. 135 

pant, I also believe that devotion to splendid ideals 
was never more profound with those who feel it, or 
more determined to conquer and to rule. The hope of 
civilization is in the school ; and, therefore, the bril- 
liant success of such an enterprise as we celebrate to- 
day is auspicious, not only for its advocates and pro- 
moters, but for society. This is one of many steps 
in the right direction. 

When I have wandered in the old world; when I 
have roamed among the scholastic cities of England ; 
when I have paused among the groves and avenues 
of Oxford and Cambridge, and seen those stately tem- 
ples and palaces rising, glorious, upon those incom- 
parable lawns; when I have mused in the gray and 
haunted gloom of venerable Winchester; when I 
have stood awe-stricken beside the ancient towers ot 
the cathedral of Canterbury, while the ivy was trem- 
bling on its walls, and the rooks were flying over it, 
and the western sun was flooding its great windows, 
and the organ was throbbing in its bosom, like a voice 
out of heaven, then, deep in my heart, I have felt the 
passionate desire that this celestial beauty, or some- 
thing like it, might be communicated to my own 
land, and made perpetual for the benefit of my people. 

That is the spirit in which I have felt, and thought, 
and written, and labored. That is why I am an ad- 
vocate and a worker for education ; and if it were 
essential for me to exhort you on this subject (which 
it is not, because you will be addressed by an honored 
friend of mine,i a far abler and more eloquent voice), 

1 John Foord, Esq. 



136 % IBreatf) of %antd. 

I should strive to impress upon your minds and memo- 
ries the enormous importance to a community of hav- 
ing within its centre an institution fraught with the 
celestial associations of beauty and devoted to the 
sacred service of learning and art. 

In my speech delivered here yesterday I addressed 
myself to the pupils, with words of friendly counsel. 
To you, sir, the principal of the Staten Island Acad- 
emy ,i I now address myself, with words of cordial con- 
gratulation. In every enterprise that I have known 
there has always been one moving spirit, whose in- 
domitable purpose and incessant industry at last ac- 
complished the desired result. In this academy en- 
terprise you have been the moving spirit. Yours was 
the steadfast purpose to obtain the new building, and 
to that purpose the last ten years of your life have 
been devoted. Your design was worthy of a scholar 
and a public-spirited citizen, and the fulfilment of it 
was worthy of an enlightened community. You have 
labored with exemplary fidelity, and you have con- 
spicuously manifested the virtues of resolution 
and patience. You now rejoice in ample and auspi- 
cious success. That success it is my privilege to 
crown. With the sanction of the trustees, and in 
the presence of your pupils and your admiring 
friends, I now commit to you the custody of this build- 
ing, and I place in your hands its keys, which are 
the symbols of your charge. No responsibility in life 
is more momentous than that which attends the 
guidance of youth. The influence of the teacher, af- 

1 Frederick E. Partington, Esq. 



€8e i^taten Sl^ianb 3ficabeitip, 137 

fecting the character and conduct of the pupil, is 
perpetual. I believe that you appreciate and deeply 
feel the solemn importance of your vocation, and I 
have only now to express the earnest hope that your 
enthusiasm and your zeal will continually be en- 
couraged and cheered by the public sympathy and 
support, and that, as the field of your labor broadens, 
your strength will endure and your success increase. 
May all blessings rest upon you, in the perform- 
ance of your duty, and upon the institution over 
which you have presided so long, so ably, and so well. 



21 



a morti of f aretxjelL 

CLOSING SPEECH AT THE STATEN ISLAND ACADEMY, 
JUNE l6, 1896.1 

THE parting moment has come, and I must say 
farewell. It is a word that has long been familiar 
to my lips; it is a word with which, as the years pass, 
we all become sadly acquainted. Life is full of partings 
and farewells. It is useless to repine at them : and if 
now, in the evening twilight of experience, I were 
asked to name the best of all the virtues, I should de- 

1 Before saying the farewell word the speaker read the following extract 
from an address by Lord Acton, delivered before the University of Cambridge, 
England : 

"I shall never again enjoy the privilege of speaking my thoughts to such an 
audience as this, and on so valued an occasion a lecturer may well be tempted 
to bethink himself whether he knows of any neglected truth, any cardinal 
proposition, that might serve as his epigraph, as a last signal, perhaps even as 
a target. I am not thinking of those shining precepts which are the regis- 
tered property of every school; that is to say : learn as much by writing as by 
reading; do not be content with the best books, seek side-lights from the 
others; have no favorites ; keep men and things apart; beware of the prestige 
of great names ; trust only authorities that you have tested ; be more severe to 
ideas than to actions ; do not overlook the strength of the bad cause or the 
weakness of the good; never be surprised by the crumbling of an idol or the 
disclosure of a skeleton ; judge talent by high-water mark, and character by 
low ; expect demoralization more from power than from cupidity ; problems 
are often more instructive than periods. . . . Most of this, I suppose, is un- 
disputed. But the weight of authority is against me when I implore you never 
to debase the moral currency or lower the standards of rectitude ; to suffer no 
man and no cause to escape the undjring penalty which history has the mission 
to inflict on wrong, but to try others by the final maxim that governs our 
lives." 



140 % Wtmf^ of HaureK. 

clare that they are a calm acceptance of fate and a 
cheerful endurance of fortune, whatever comes. 

New duties await you. New scenes will open be- 
fore you. Try to make others happy. Try to diffuse 
happiness at every step. True success is in the mo- 
ment. Remember that you are as much in eternity 
now as you will be ever, and therefore let your plans 
of excellence and achievement be made for to-day and 
not for to-morrow. Nothing in human life is so sad as 
the blind propensity of almost all kinds of people 
to resolve to be something different and better, by and 
by. Your hour is now, or it is never. 

I request you to take from my hands the diplomas of 
the academy. They are not only the certificates of 
your scholarship, but of the delight of your parents, 
the sympathy of your friends, and the approval of your 
teachers. Take them, and with every blessing. You 
will be remembered here ; and we, in turn, hope that 
we may not be forgotten. Fare you well ! and, in the 
language of the old Bible: "The Lord watch between 
thee and me, when we are absent one from another." 



RECORD OF NAMES 



BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD OF NAMES 
MENTIONED IN THE FOREGOING SPEECHES. 

Aristides - B.C. 468 

Juvenal ' Abt. 60 - 140 A.D. 

St. Columba 521 - 597 

Empress Maud . . , Abt. 1102 - 1 167 

Stephen, King of England 1105 - 1154 

Henry De Blois 1 171 

Henry VI., King of England 1421 - 1471 

Richard III., King of England 1452 - 1485 

Anne, Queen of England, wife of Richard III 1456 - 1484 

Henry VIII., King of England 1491 - 1547 

Edward VI., King of England 1537 - 1553 

Sir Philip Sidney 1554 - 1586 

William Shakespeare 1564 - 1616 

Robert Herrick 1591 - 1674 

Richard Burbage 1629 

John Hampden IS94 - 1643 

John Milton 1608 - 1674 

James Graham, > 

First Marquis of Montrose S ^^^^ ~ ^^5° 

Abraham Cowley 1618 - 1667 

Robert South, D. D 1633 - 1716 

Thomas Betterton 1635 - 1710 

John Graham, of Claverhouse, 1 g _ go 

Viscount Dundee J 
John Churchill, 1 jg^^ _ ^^^2 

First Duke of Marlborough ^ 

William III., King of England 1650 - 1702 

Anne, Queen of England 1664 - 1714 

Matthew Prior 1664 - 1721 

143 



144 3li !l^reatl[j of %awcth 



Robert Wilks 1666 - 1732 

William Congreve 1670 - 1729 

Colley Gibber 1671 - 1757 

Thomas Yalden 1671 - 1736 

Henry St. John, ) 

First Viscount Bolingbroke \ ^^^^ ~ ^^Sl 

Edward Young 1684 - 1765 

Joseph Miller . . 1684 - 1738 

Alexander Pope 1688 - 1744 

Robert Blair 1699 - 1 747 

Henry Fielding 1707 - 1754 

Samuel Johnson . 1 709 - 1 784 

David Hume . . 1711 - 1776 

David Garrick 1 716 - 1 779 

Thomas Gray 1716 - 1771 

Margaret Woffington 1719 - 1760 

Spranger Barry . 1719 - 1777 

Adam Smith 1723 - 1790 

Sir Joshua Reynolds 1723 - 1792 

Oliver Goldsmith 1728 - 1774 

Thomas Jefferson, Rip's great-grandfather 1728 - 1807 

Edmund Burke 1729 - 1797 

Frances Abington 1731 - 1815 

Beilby Porteus 1731 - 1808 

William Cowper 1731 - 1800 

George Washington 1 732 - 1 799 

James Dodd 1 796 

Patrick Henry 1 736 - 1 799 

Edward Gibbon 1737 - 1794 

James Boswell 1 740 - 1 795 

Francis Dominic Toussaint L'Ouverture 1743 - 1803 

Charles Dibdin 1 745 - 1814 

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe 1 749 - 1832 

Robert Ferguson . . 1750 - 1774 

Thomas Wignell 1753?- 1803 

Dugald Stewart 1 753 - 1828 

George Crabbe 1754 - 1832 



Mtcott of l^ame^^ 145 



Sarah Siddons 1755 - 1831 

John Philip Kemble 1757 - 1823 

William Gifford 1757 - 1829 

Horatio Nelson, Viscount and Admiral 1758 - 1805 

Mason L. Weems 1759 - 1825 

Robert Burns 1 759 - 1 796 

John Bannister 1760 - 1835 

William Dunlap 1766 - 1839 

John Hodgkinson (Meadowcraft) 1767 - 1805 

William Chapman 1769 - 1839 

Anne Brunton (Mrs. Merry, Mrs. Wignell, Mrs. 

Warren) 1770 - 1805 

William Wordsworth 1770 - 1850 

Sir Walter Scott 1771 - 1832 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ^772 - 1834 

Robert William EUiston 1774 - 1831 

Joseph Jefferson, Rip's grandfather ^774 - 1832 

Charles Lamb 1775 - 1834 

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775 - 1851 

Charles Kemble 1775 - 1854 

Walter Savage Landor 1 775 - 1864 

Charles James Mathews, the elder 1776 - 1835 

Thomas (Abthorpe) Cooper 1776 - 1849 

George Barthold Niebuhr . , 1776 - 1831 

Charles Mayne Young 1777 - 1856 

Thomas Moore 1779 - 1852 

Lemuel Shaw 1781 - 1861 

Washington Irving 1783 - 1859 

Theron Metcalf 1784 - 1875 

Henry J. Finn 1 785 - 1840 

Thomas De Quincey 1785 - 1859 

Henry Kirke White 1785 - 1806 

Edmund Kean 1 787 - 1833 

John Louis Uhland 1787 - 1862 

Richard Henry Dana , 1787 - 1879 

George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron) 1788 - 1824 

Fitz-Greene Halleck 1790 - 1867 

22 



% Wttm of %mtth 



James Buchanan 1 791 - 1868 

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 - 1822 

William Charles Macready 1793 - 1873 

Samuel G. Goodrich 1793 ~ ^^^^ 

James William Wallack, the elder 1794 - 1864 

Charles G. Loring 1794 - 1867 

Edward Everett 1794 - 1865 

Joel Parker 1795 - 1875 

George Peabody 1 795 - 1869 

Joseph Rodman Drake 1795 - 1820 

John Keats 1 796 - 1821 

Junius Brutus Booth, the elder 1796 - 1852 

Frederick Henry Yates 1797 - 1842 

Theophilus Parsons 1797 - 1882 

Benjamin F. Hallett 1797 - 1862 

Thomas Hood 1 798 - 1845 

Thomas Barry 1 798 - 1876 

Henry Placide 1799 - 1870 

Rufus Choate 1 799 - 1859 

Sidney Bartlett 1 799 - 1889 

James Henry Hackett 1800 ~ 1871 

J. Hardy Prince 1801 - i86l 

William Evans Burton 1802 - i860 

Charles James Mathews, the younger 1803 - 1879 

Charles B. Parsons 1803 - 1871 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 - 1882 

Joseph Jefferson, Rip's father 1804 - 1842 

Thomas Flynn 1804 - 1849 

Wilham Rufus Blake 1805 - 1863 

Edwin Forrest 1806 - 1872 

James Oakes 1807 - 1878 

Henry Wads worth Longfellow 1807 - 1882 

John G. Whittier 1807 - 1892 

John R. Scott 1808 - 1865 

John Brougham 1808 - 1880 

Alfred Tennyson ' 1809 - 1892 

Oliver Wendell Holmes .... 1809 - 1894 



i^tcottx of l^amc^. 



147 



Henry Giles 1809 - 1882 

John Gibbs Gilbert 1810 - 1889 

George Tyler Bigelow 1810 - 1878 

Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman 1875 

Frances Anne Kemble 181 1 - 1893 

Horace Greeley 181 1 - 1873 

William Makepeace Thackeray 181 1 - 1863 

James Edward Murdoch 181 1 - 1893 

Wendell Phillips 181 1 - 1884 

Charles Sumner 181 1 - 1874 

William Warren 1812 - 1888 

Charles Dickens, the elder 1812 - 1870 

Epes Sargent 1812 - 1880 

John C. Fremont . . 1813 - 1890 

Francis A. Durivage 1814 - 1881 

Henry Clapp, Jr 1814?- 1875 

Andrew Jackson Neafie 1815 - 1892 

Wyzeman Marshall 1815 - 1896 

Charlotte Cushman 1815 - 1876 

Charles Fisher 1816 - 1891 

Edwin L. Davenport 1816 - 1877 

Joseph Proctor 1816 - 1897 

James Anthony Froude 1818 - 1894 

James William Wallack, the younger 1818 - 1873 

Catherine Farren (Mary Anne Russell) 1818 - 1894 

John Johnstone Wallack (Lester Wallack) 1819 - 1888 

Charles Kingsley .... 1819 - 1875 

Hudson Kirby 1819 - 1848 

Edwin Percy Whipple 1819 - 1886 

James Russell Lowell 1819 - 1891 

Rachel (EUzabeth Rachel Felix) 1820 - 1858 

George Eliot (Marian Evans) 1820 - 1881 

Herbert Spencer 1820 

Edward Eddy 1821 - 1875 

Charles T. Congdon 1821 - 1891 

Charles St. Thomas Burke 1822 - 1854 

Stephen Gordon Nash 1822 - 1894 



148 % iBrcatfj of %amd* 



Matthew Arnold 1822 - 1888 

Donald G. Mitchell 1822 

John Edmund Owens 1823 - 1886 

Edward F. Keach 1824 - 1863 

Charles Fechter 1824 - 1879 

William Wilkie Collins 1824 - 1889 

Henry Charles Fitzroy Somerset, Duke of Beaufort. 1824 

George William Curtis ... 1824 - 1892 

Richard Henry Stoddard 1825 

Bayard Taylor 1825 - 1878 

Adelaide Ristori 1826 

William Warland Clapp 1826 - 1891 

Charles Bullard Fairbanks , 1827 - 1859 

Curtis Guild 1827 

Ulysses S. Grant 1828 - 1885 

Joseph Jefferson (Rip Van Winkle) . 1829 

Fanny Janauschek 1830 

Julia Dean 1830 - 1868 

Elizabeth Crocker (Mrs. D. P. Bowers) 1830 - 1895 

A. Wallace Thaxter, Jr 1832 - 1864 

Tommaso Salvini 1833 

Edmund Clarence Stedman 1833 

Edwin Thomas Booth 1833 - 1893 

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Baron Acton. 1834 

Edwin Adams 1834 - 1877 

Erastus Wiman 1834 

Harriet McEwen Kimball 1834 - 

Marie Seebach 1834 - 1897 

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) 1835 

William Winter 1836 

Lawrence Barrett 1836 - 1891 

John McCullough , 1837 - 1885 

Andrew Carnegie 1837 

Henry Irving 1838 

Augustin Daly 1838 

John Hare (Fairs) 1838 

Francis Bret Harte '. . . . 1839 



^Hccotti of l^amcief* 149 



Thomas Hardy 1840 

Joseph F. Daly 1840 

WiUiam Black 1841 

Charles F. Coghlan 1842 

Edward Dowden 1843 

Helena Modjeska (Helena Benda) 1844 

John Foord 1844 

Adelaide Neilson 1846?- 1880 

Ellen Terry 1848 

Sarah Bernhardt 1850 

Ian Maclaren (Rev. John Watson, D. D.) 1850 

Frederick E. Partington 1854 — 

Mary Anderson (Mrs. De Navarro) 1859 

S. R. Crockett 1859 

Ada Rehan l86o 

James M. Barrie ... i860 

Rudyard Kipling 1865 

William Isherwood 1841 

Arthur Winter 1872 - 1886 



The author would express his grateful appreciation of the kind 
assistance given to him, in his search for authentic dates, by 
Col. T. Allston Brown, Mr. Douglas Taylor, Mr, Willis Fletcher 
Johnson, Mr. Francis M. Stanwood, Mr. B. F. Stevens, Mr. 
Augustin Daly, and Mr. F. E. Partington. — There is scarcely 
a name in the foregoing Record that has not been, or might 
not be, the theme of thoughtful essay or pleasing reminiscence. 




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